My work on the 3D printing lab began with a search through Thingiverse for a suitably impossible object. Eventually, the object that I settled on was an object simply titled “Geometric.” The object both looked cool and was definitely impossible to manufacture reasonably with an other technique.

To print my object, I decided to use the printers from the Wet Lab because this was one of my few chances to use the fancy printers without large personal cost. As it turned out, neither of the prints were that expensive. The more expensive print was the Fortus print which cost $9.80. Since I was printing on the Wet Lab printers, I needed help from the Lab Assistants to use them. Among the Lab Assistants, Josh and Tori were especially helpful. When I first went into the Wet Lab, the Objet was in use, so I printed on the Fortus first. This also made the most sense because the Fortus prints take a long time in the lye bath to finish post-processing.

The user interface for the Fortus software is absolutely atrocious, so Josh, Tori, and I had to puzzle over how to properly upload my print for a while even with the help of the Lab Assistant instruction manual. Eventually though, we finally got the print going. Since the someone else’s Objet print and was going to take a while it was already the afternoon, I left to come back the next day to make sure my piece ended up in the lye bath and start my Objet print.

When I came back the next day, the Eclipse guys were working on their carbon fiber rocket tube in the Wet Lab, so I couldn’t get in there to start my Objet job. However, I needed to make sure my Fortus print was in the lye bath since I had been told it takes around 18 hours in the lye bath for the support to fully dissolve. One of the lab assistants was my hero, and she strapped on a mask and went into the Wet Lab to check on my print. When she went in, she saw that my print had been taken out of the Fortus but whoever had taken it out hadn’t moved it to the lye bath for some reason. She then put it in the lye bath for me.

Later that day, I came back to run my Objet job. Just like the Fortus, the user interface for the Objet was pretty terrible, so it took a lab assistant and me a solid half hour to figure out how to print on it.

Once I got the print running though, the Objet was straight up magical. I came back the next morning to find that my piece had printed without issue. One interesting thing about the Objet is that the piece feels really slimy before it is processed. I tossed the piece in the high pressure water blaster and went at it. When I first used the high pressure water, I didn’t hold on to the water gun hard enough and the recoil from the water actually blasted the gun out of my hand. The piece came out of the post-processing great though despite my initial incompetence! Basically, the moral of the story is that I love the Objet.

The Fortus on the other was pretty much the opposite of my experience with the Objet. The print actually came out fine, so I guess the Fortus itself did its job. However, the lye bath most definitely did not take 18 hours. Instead, after 26 hours, the support still wasn’t fully dissolved. Progress was definitely being made but not nearly as fast as expected. I left it in to go for even longer, but someone took the piece out that evening for some reason even though it was obviously unfinished. As a result, when I came in the next morning, I found an unfinished piece outside of the lye bath instead of a finished piece inside of the lye bath. I put the piece back in the bath, but it won’t quite be done by noon Monday. It will probably be done by Monday afternoon.

The big lesson that I learned during this project is that 3D printing can take even longer than I imagined. Unlike most everything we have worked with so far this semester, 3D printing has a lot of time where you can’t do anything to speed up the process by working more. I thought 3 days would be plenty of time as that is usually more than enough time for a lab but this time I was wrong.

Edit (8:20 p.m., April 2): Someone took my print out of the lye bath… again…

Edit #2 (12:45 p.m., April 3): As of noon today, I took my Fortus print out of the lye bath, and it was done! I moved it into the capsule right after. It’s amazing what can happen when the print actually stays in the lye bath.

– Nick