The Bench is Back

An homage to Elton John to start this post about—what else—3D printing.  I may not have been writing about it a lot here, but everyone around me is hearing about it constantly.   I ask my husband to check on my print before going to bed and if I wake up in the middle of the night I'll get up and start a new print after removing the completed print from the build plate. 

3D printing takes time.   It's laying down tiny bits of melted plastic out of a 0.4mm hole in a nozzle that travels around in a pattern created by "slicer" software that's created a map of how the plastic should be laid out so that the model will come out looking like the picture on your screen. 

Before you can even get there, someone has to design the cute model of a fox in a CAD (Computer-Aided Design) tool.   There are many options and CAD tools have been around since I was in college but today they're easier to use with even free options available to the hobbyist.   I don't CAD.   Perhaps I will at some point, but since I'm a terrible artist, I don't see me making delightful little creations after days of frustrating toil when skilled people can do a far, far better job.   I like those people. 

Back to the printing.   It's slow, but once you get over the standing over the printer, waiting to hope to get a glimpse of something when the build head moves to the left or right and really hoping nothing's gone wrong and the print has to be abandoned and started over again (best case) or the nozzle is jammed and the build head has to be taken apart and cleaned before the print can be restarted (worse case), it's lots of fun.

These days I'm better at preventing the first scenario from happening because I've learned a lot about how to slice different types of models as well as the best settings for the various types of filaments I have.   There are times, however, when the second case occurs.   When this happened the first few times I was highly frustrated and anxious because I didn't know how to mechanically take apart the build head, clean out what was gunked up, replace the Bowden tube if it was impacted, and swap out for a different print nozzle if needed—without breaking anything.  Today, when the clog invariably happens, it's a quick job I can whistle through, interested in what I'll find that caused the clog when I get inside. 

I've been printing a lot of things, but the largest focus has been manipulatives for my daughter's VI teachers.   There are countless things in this world a blind person doesn't have a full understanding of and can't from words alone.   An object to touch, when your fingers are your eyes, makes more difference than I can imagine.  So I've been thinking about what might be helpful for the VI teachers at my daughter's school, and through communication with them, I ended up printing these geometric shapes:

First I printed wire-framed versions of the Platonic solids.   Then I found a huge variety of polyhedra, some with a combination of wire-frame and solid sides that would help for tactile determination, and then I worked on prisms and anti-prisms.   The pictures make these look sort of tiny, and they're not large, but they took about an hour-and-a-half each, plus model clean-up time, slicing and starting the next print, not to mention those hours I lost to sleep, and it was a busy week.  Did I mention failed prints and clogged nozzels?  Yep, there were some of those too. 

 My daughter's brailist was just as pleased with them as I was, from the conversation I had with her in masks in the car I couldn't exit from per regulation when I went to pick up more binders of work for my daughter earlier this week.   She told me they had only the basic shapes and these would help for fourth- and fifth-grade math.

So what's this title about that's a nod to Elton John's song, "The Bitch is Back"?  Remember how I mentioned I'd found a low-cost resin printer in a recent post?   It came in two days ago and we've been testing it out.   It's also slow printing, but in this case, it's curing layers of resin in a bath of the liquified resin with a model that's printed upside-down.  The completed model has to have uncured resin cleaned off from it and then it has to sit under a UV light to do final curing.   

I decided to print the "Benchy" benchmark model in the resin printer to see how it compared to the filament-printed version.  It looks pretty impressive.   Mind you, the Benchy model was created to test the rigors of filament printers and is, in a way, a lot easier for a resin printer to print.   It still was interesting to see them side-by-side. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been not so impressed with the 3D printing so far.   He liked an articulated hummingbird I made but when I gave it to my daughter's VI teachers he wanted me to print him a flock of, "Majestic Birds" (completely rejecting the name hummingbird.).  What did impress him are two models he's now claimed as his own:  Killbot and Cubebot who are both articulated models that print in place and come off the print bed with their limbs moving, and in the case of Killbot, his head rotating.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I made the post and took the picture of my daughter's school binder books too soon, or perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it because now we have five more binders.   I was thinking these would all go back to school with her when she's able to get back on campus.   Then I realized the current plan is to rotate students through the classroom, having one week on-campus with live instruction and two weeks distanced learning.   I think this means I'm glad I had a free five-foot table on which we can store her school binders.