Picking a Design

Looking through Thingiverse: I picked out a few potential designs:

I hadn’t seen anyone try to do a maraca, and I liked the idea of making something functional, so I went with that one. Originally, I was hoping to make the design a bit better. I liked the idea but wanted it to look more like a classic maraca. However, SolidWorks is not built for editing STLs. I tried using Meshmixer instead, but that was also a disaster as I am somewhat unfamiliar with the tools (see below).

So I stuck with the original design.

Printing

My first print was on the Prusa. It did not go as planned, because the internal beads are essentially floating parts and had nothing to stick to.

After waiting a couple days for the 3D printers with support to be fixed, I printed on the ultimaker 3. Once the supports were dissolved, the print was perfect, and fit well in the container provided. I knew that the Resin print would give me more trouble so I decided to make 3 more FDM prints. Next, the I used the Form 3 to make a part. Unfortunately, there were too many internal supports to be able to extract them from the inside without breaking the delicate mesh on the bottom.

Fortunately, the slicing software allows for the supports to be modified, so I deleted as many internal supports as the software would allow. These supports were much easer to extract. Here’s the final product:

Cost Analysis

For the FDM, 4 prints of 6.52 g of PLA and 1.09 g of soluble support at 15 cents a print makes 60 cents. These took 1:15 h each or 5 hr total. The original print failed after four minutes and used a negligible amount of material.

The SLA had one failed print, one successful. Each print took 3.5 hours, though the bed was loaded with other prints for efficiency, so timing is not exact. At $175 a liter, two 22.5 mL prints would cost 7 dollars and 86 cents.

Total print time: 12 hrs

At an electricity cost of $0.08 per hour, that’s 96 cents. Adding a maintenance cost of $0.07 per hour or 63 cents, the total becomes $1.59

Labor: I spent about 3 hours on this project, between 1.5 hrs of searching through thingiverse/attempting to modify it, and 1.5 hours attending to the prints and problem solving. Someone my age and education might get paid $21 and hour, making labor the most expensive part of this project at 63 dollars.

In summary: $0.60 FDM + $7.86 SLA + $1.59 machine costs = $10.05

With labor, that makes $73.05