weeks

Week 04 HOW LONG IS IT GOING TO TAKE!? aka 3D printing and scaning

The print is a little funky with some small gaps and a few PLA boogers. The gaps are design error because I had never used Blender before but was able to successfully do some Boolean operations. I used a 3DWOX for this week's design constraints. ACT has two of these in their electronics lab and they are the printers I am most likely using/showing our students how to use. The slicer software is proprietary and works fine. There are two modes: easy and advanced. Easy mode gets you four options for printing: fast, normal, normal quiet and fine. The time of the print increased with the quality. You can also select what type of support you want but that’s about it.

In advanced you can change EVERYTHING. All sorts of things that control the speed of the print head, temp, retraction, raft size, fill style…lots of different things in a bunch of different categories.

The tests were printed on fast mode and the entire print took about 9 hours. The results were comparable to what was shown in the example pics. I should have added supports for the sliding bolt fit test; it made a little bit of spaghetti.
Oh man. I could have sculpted this in minutes using regular clay and had it been way cooler. But after trying and deleting and trying a bunch I made a thing that looks like a skull and printed it.

The first print failed due to a lack of support. I used the internal analyze action of the slicer to optimize the orientation of the ring, but the most optimal set the ring face down and I didn’t want the supports to be all over the face. I selected the second best option, added more supports and increased the size a little bit and the print came out great.