Shoutout to Chinwe (though you’ll probably never read this) for picking a cool impossible design that I shamelessly stole for myself!

So I have never actually 3D printed anything before. I’ve always managed to shunt it off to teammates or friends, even though I’ve honestly always been interested in the capabilities and possibilities of 3D printing. No idea why it took me so long to finally do this.

Anyways, after deciding on a design that I liked and wanted to try, I clicked some buttons and found myself in the “Layout” workspace on 3DPrintingOS. At this point, we hadn’t gotten the gumball capsule dimensions yet, so I figured I’d scale the original file down to about 90% and just gun it for my first ever 3D print. If it happened to fit in the capsule after we got them, then that would be an added bonus.

As beginner’s luck would have it, my first ever 3D print went off without a hitch! No errors, no fails, not wonky unexpected parts. Dr. Wettergreen, you set my expectations low for my first print so I was pleasantly surprised!

Now came the tricky business of removing the supports. I was so excited to get home and show my housemates, I forgot that supports were a thing. So I ended up taking the scissors-part of a pocketknife and a cutting board and going to town on the supports. It took a while — I sat in on  a Duncan Bachelor watch party while mindlessly prying support materials off the print. My fingers hurt afterwards, and despite my best efforts I kept finding bits of filament on my dining table for days after, BUT! It was so satisfying to finally shake the rings and watch/hear/feel them jangle independently from one another.

Bonus: cat liked playing with the design 🙂 Luna Fascinated

SLA printing was a bit more of a challenge. Hoang, Rachel, and I put all our prints into one file to print together (see Hoang’s blog post for more details on our misadventures with this one). Long story short, the three of us bonded over our blunders, and with our final successful print are now an unstoppable team ready to take on the chess project 🙂

Total cost

FDM total cost = (FDM material cost x prints) + (FDM machine cost x total machine runtime)
= ($0.42 x 4) + ($1 x 12)
= $13.68

SLA total cost = (SLA material cost x prints) + (SLA machine cost x machine runtime)
= ($2 x 1) + ($1 x 4)
= $6

Labor total cost = labor rate x hours
= $15 x 4
= $60

*Assuming a machine cost (both FDM and SLA) of $1 an hour, and a labor rate of $15 an hour (lab assistant rate)

FDM + SLA + Labor = $79.68