Our task this week was to 3D print an impossible object, or something that would be hard to manufacture by conventional methods. Looking through Thingiverse, I decided to print a Klein bottle, which is a non-orientable 2D surface (think like a Mobius strip, but in a higher dimension). Here is what is looks like in Wikipedia, and the model I chose from Thingiverse. Technically, the pure form of a Klein bottle exists in 4D, so this is merely the 3-dimensional projection of the surface. If you want to read more about that, read the Wiki page.

I knew this would be a hard print since it has so many holes, but I decided as a first pass to try the normal FDM printers available at the OEDK. The print took ~4 hours and I made sure to use a nice raft so the print would come out nice. They involved a lot of support material, which I would later have to take off. Here is a picture of the result:

As you can see, there is a TON of support material and not very much room to take it out. I used pliers, but ended up breaking a lot of the small skinny support pieces. This was bad, so I decided to use one of the industrial 3D printers that prints out dissolvable support material. That way, I could throw it in the lye bath overnight and not worry about breaking the outside of the piece. The industrial print took 7 hours and has much better resolution, which you can see if you inspect the piece up close. Here is the results before the lye bath, and after.

 

Overall this was a cool project, and it was nice learning about 3D printing and getting to see the difference between normal and industrial-grade 3D printers. Even though this piece might be better for an STL printer, it was also cool to test the limits of FDM.