When I first read the prompt for this assignment I had a hard time coming up with an idea that could only be made on a 3D printer. I guess that the reason that I had difficulty is because my brain tends to think of things in terms of conventional and established manufacturing methods and these methods tend to be mostly two dimensional or constructed from two dimensional shapes.

Eventually, I decided that I wanted whatever I made to have a use outside of class. I began to look at different types of jewelry on Thingiverse, inspired by the intricate bracelet that was shown as an example in class. I stumbled across another bracelet on Thingiverse that could only be made with a 3D printer.

The bracelet I found was made by a user named roman_hegglin and it was made in the Voronoi style. After doing some research, I found out that Voronoi was a Russian mathematician. Voronoi did most of his research on fractions and thus it makes sense that the “Voronoi diagram” he found was a mathematical approach to breaking up a plane into different regions. These different regions were based on distance between a specific set of points in the plane. The simplest examples of the Voronoi diagram are two dimensional but the diagram has many different three dimensional representations as well.

The file on Thingiverse actually contained four different styles of the same Voronoi bracelet but each shared similar characteristics just with different sized lattices.
I ended up choosing a bracelet that had a medium amount of detail so that the 3D printer would not need to generate as much support material.

This was the bracelet that I chose. I had no issues with the file setup or inputting it into the 3D printing software (a lab tech walked me through everything). The model was 0.74 cubic inches of printable area and 2.33 cubic inches of support. The total cost was $29.56. The print time quoted on the Dimension printer was around eleven hours however, the lab tech mentioned that it is generally inaccurate.

I chose the Dimension to print on because I felt that my part was best suited to the FDM printing process. Polyjet printing was obviously not necessary because I did not require multiple materials/colors. I did not believe that stereolithography would give me the same level of strength as FDM for a part that would be on a wrist and thus exposed to stress (I could be wrong).

I didn’t manage to get a great photo of the part straight out of the printer but here is a blurry one:

As you can see, the bottom of the part was mostly shrouded in support material. For post processing, the part needed to be submerged in the sodium hydroxide bath for around six hours to remove all of the support material.

These photos show the finished part. I was very pleased with the level of detail that I could achieve with the FDM process. The structure of the part is true to the design which means that the support material did its job. The only flaws visible are slight protrusions of material at the edges of the holes and where the joints became too thin.

Overall, I am very happy with my finished print. It was nice to have a mostly hands off project (sit back and let the machines do the work) and I think that the final piece is very beautiful! I would love to try and cast one out of silver (wax investment casting?) and make a real high-class piece. I’d imagine that the mold would look a lot like a ant hill.