First off, I didn’t know how long 3-D printing would take. Then printer that we used had an ink-jet like nozzle that made the three dimensional objects. This is amazing since something 1 cubic feet in size would need a tens of hours in order to complete.

For my project, I was originally going to do an airplane, but because we did not create our own files, but rather download them from a website called “thingyverse”, there is no real way to tell whether there will be defects in the .stl file. The .stl file extension is what the laser printer detects and uses it to program itself accordingly. The closest thing to checking would be downloading the file as a .sldprt file in SolidWorks to see if all the joints that make up the material are connected. However, for the plane all the joints were connected but the part still would not work. Since there was no way to tell if the complex parts would work or not I ended up choosing a spur gear.

The point of this exercise was also to make sure that our parts could not be created with any other single process. The spur gear cannot be molded since the middle hole would have to be tapped separately. Plasma cutting and laser cutting is not of the option since there are two distinct geometries that stack on top of each other. At 2 inches thick it would also be pretty thick for a laser cutter to cut through.

When trying to actually print the part, I had to two choices of printers. The first is

this machine which does a good job with very thin and detailed parts but after I abandoned my airplane model I did not need to use this. This printer is also really finnicky and not reliable. So….I used this one.

 

This printer needed have the size and orientation specified and it would tell you how much material if would use. This printer is really reliable and the finished product looked like….

 

Right off the bat, I noticed that the laser printer is accurate, but not entirely precise. Because of the material it is often difficult to do post processing finishes. As a result, while it can print difficult geometries, the tradeoff is really accuracy.