Liz Whitewolf

PROJECT_05_3D_printing

Scan Something!

Our Fab Lab has a Cube Sense scanner, which is quite tricky to use. I tried scanning a number of things, and I noticed that the smaller the things were, the more difficult they were to scan successfully. I ended up scanning Doug, who is quite big and also a technician here at the science center. He walked in at the right time and was willing to sit in the wheely chair. I held the Cube Sense scanner about 24" from him, and I moved it systematically up and down while the slowly sheeled the chair around in a circle. The result was a scan of his torso with the chair back, but it was not bad. I was happy enough with the detail, though the complexity of using the scanner is a bit much. The .stl file can be found here.



Design and Print Something!

The timing of this assignment worked nicely in our schedule at the lab, since we are currently doing a program for elementary students called "Hometown, PA." The students get a chance to build a town from scratch, designing the first fifteen buildings and then printing the models on our 3D printers. I thought I'd join in on the fun, and so I designed a train station. Because, in my ideal Hometown, a train station is a quaint necessity. Also, I added enough detail that it would be impossible to do in subtractive machining. I did this design using Tinkercad, which I found to be very intuitive. The .stl file can be found here.

When I went to print this design on our Ultimaker 2, I had a little trouble. For one thing, there was too much detail on the trains themselves, and they ended up printing as spaghetti. The outer wall of the train bay was too thin, so that didn't print either. I was surprised that the remainder of the building printed out fine even though the outermost wall failed early on. At this size, about 50mm high, it took about 7 hours to print (with the infill at 10%). Here is how it looked.


I used the pre-set settings for a normal quality print on an Ultimake 2, and the only thing I changed was the infill. I tried printing it again with an infill of 20%, but it said it was going to take 12 hours, and I pulled it off after the trains again failed early on in the print. I think my design was a little too detailed for such a small print on an Ultimaker.

Testing the Printer's Capabilities

Though I have no group, no local instructor, and nobody here to team up with for this group challenge, I tackled it anyway. I searched online for a good design that would test the limits of my Ultimaker 2 machines. I found a good file here.


There were specific details about how to measure the piece and what to check for. I got my piece printed, with the recommended settings, in 2 hours and 11 minutes. (I did notice that the Cura software does a great job of estimating the time for a print- so far it has been quite accurate.)


The piece ended up measuring quite accurately, and I was happy with the sizes, though I am not happy with the finish of the print. I think I need to make my shell thicker.