My idea for this week is to scan a reproduction of one of the pieces I have researched in my ongoing project "Canupa Inyan: The Carvings of My Ancestors." I have traveled to museums around the country photographing, drawing and recreating Dakota artwork, mostly canupa, or pipestone pieces. Museum collections are often inaccessible, and I wonder if some of the treasured pieces held within those walls could be 3D printed and shared with Dakota cultural practioners and artists in order to learn about traditional forms.
Once I have learned how to scan and print using the available technology and methods, I will be able to utilize it in my museum research. In the meantime, for this week's lesson, I decided to create an print a piece, and try the scanning process from start to finish, to acquaint myself with the processes.
Group project:
After receiving the 3D printing and scanning training from John and Tom in the CBA shop, several group members stayed to work on the group project. We downloaded the 3D print tolerance test from Thingiverse and spent some time converting the file and prepping it for printing in one of the Sindoh machines, with the help of Tom.
A couple of us also practiced scanning an object, in this case, Nefertiti's head, in order to learn how to create a successful scan.
3D Printing:
That evening, with my newfound skills in working with Fusion 360, I created a design called "Spiral Bauble." My goal was to make a piece that had a separate body as part of the design that could move independently. It's a simple spiral with spheres at each end that prevent a torus from falling off the spiral.
Using the Fusion print studio, I created meshes of each of the bodies separately and imported them together so they would print together and exported the file at an .stl.
Tom printed the piece in the Stratasys Objet Eden 260VS, which uses a method similar to inkjet printing, printing the object in flat layers. When I came to pick it up and completed the post-printing processing, I noticed the surface was oily. I utilized the wet blast cabinet to remove the supports and the piece was no longer oily. After drying, the material is firm yet flexible. It has turned out to be a fun toy to play with.
As a bonus for getting my file in first, Tom printed "Spiral Bauble" in the larger printer, the Dimension Elite, which can handle larger print jobs. Scaled up from the original size, the final piece is approximately 8 inches tall and 5 inches wide and made in ABS. The printing process took 22 hours to complete. The post printing processing for this includes removing the support material, a brown soluble support technology (sst). First, I used a pair of pliers to break the rigid support material off the ABS, which shattered into the garbage can. Then, Tom brought me down to the basement, where the piece was placed into a lye bath for several hours to dissolve the remaining sst. Finally, a water bath removes the rest of the support material.
This week I was able to experiment with two different materials: different forms of ABS. When using a spiral form like a spring, rigid material can become tensile. In Spiral Bauble, the piece must give way a bit to let the torus pass beyond the ball tip. The more flexible of the materials, the ABS used in the mini models, this is not a problem, the material bends a bit and the torus gives way. In the large model, the ABS is much more rigid, it cracked a bit when testing the limits of its tensility.
For me there is always a lingering question of the ecological impacts of the materials commonly used, and I wonder how using materials that don't require ecologically exploitative extraction can be created. My interest in 3D printers surrounds the use of various materials that start off as liquids and end up in the finished state as solids, for example, clay, cement, plaster or even glass. After using the two materials this week to make Spiral Bauble, I am curious about how to use semi-viscous substances that may have variables that could make uniformity with the material difficult. This weekend, a clay artist, Bryan Czibesz, came to the Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT to make a ceramic 3D printer and create pieces with it. I did more research on his work and on various styles of clay 3D printers. It's an interesting area, and one that warrants more research and testing. Still, there seems to be many limitations that make it an impractical technology (at its current stage) for most users.
3D Scanning:
My daughter came with me to the CBA shop on Friday, and was interested in the scanning process. We used the Sense 2 to scan her to attempt to create an accurate 3D image of her, for possible printing. It took several attempts to fully capture her, but we were finally successful.
The use of 3D scanning and printing at its's current stage can be useful in relation to heritage preservation. In doing my ongoing project, "Canupa Inyan: The Carvings of My Ancestors," one of my discoveries is the wealth of cultural knowledge embedded within each piece I have been lucky to interact with in museum collections. Due to colonization and cultural genocide of indigenous peoples of this continent, important pieces of cultural patrimomy reside in collections, inaccessible to most tribal people who should, at minimum, have access to them to learn from them. What if these pieces, within the precepts of tribal cultural protocols, could be digitally scanned and printed, so that tribal people could at least see and touch copies of these forms? The Sense 2 could be used, in a non-intrusive way to scan the exterior of the piece. Looking at the Sense 2 website for information on how the images are obtained and stitched together to form a digital 3D image, I found out that the Alliance for Integrated Spatial Technologies at the University of South Florida is doing this work to varying degrees.