Alright alright alright… Just got done with pulling my first all-nighter of college I’m feeling fantastic. I am currently laying in my bed typing this out as my eyelids fall lower and lower. I seriously do not know how I am awake right now. But anyways, onto 3D printing. So for this week we had the task of finding something on thingiverse that could only really be made on a 3D printer and then print it. Being the leader of the maker bar/3D printing corner, I thought this would be super simple, but as always, it wasn’t.

The trouble started out on Thingiverse. At first I wanted to do chain mail or some kind of 3D printed fabric, because why the hell not? I tried it: Failed. Tried it again: failed again. So I scrapped the idea and moved on to a spiral hollow sphere that looked super cool, That one didn’t last 1 minute on the bed before it began to peel up and eventually fail. Why the hell did this keep happening? Was I just picking the objects that refused to print well? The world may never know. But eventually I stumbled upon this hyper cube design, that was simple, elegant, and pretty damn cool if you ask me. Here’s the picture from thingiverse of the 3D model of the part.

Pretty cool right? I did a little research into what a hypercube was, and it turns out it is a 3D “shadow” or projection of a 4D cube, a teseract (Yes that is its legit name.) Take a look here.  (Also I just fell asleep on my keyboard for  a few seconds so I’m gonna try to wrap this up a little quicker.)

After failing probably close to 8 prints, this bad boy came out near perfect on the first try. I was super pumped. Especially because it was Friday night and I was leaving for home the next morning. After pulling off all of the support, I was left with a spiffy little cube.  Obviously the FDM printers in the maker bar are going to have some faults, and one of theirs is the fact that support cannot dissolve away and thus the part is much more jagged from where the support met with the bed,  but they are quick and free, so whats not to love? As for the second print, I elected to go for the objet since I hadn’t used in a while, and due to its crazy high resolution. I was not disappointed with the results. This one came out much, much cleaner than the last one. It was kinda sad though, I didn’t get to use the water jet machine to take off the support since someone had already done that for me. But it still came out looking great and I was super please.

All in all this was a pretty fun assignment, we were able to do basically anything we wanted, shape wise, as long as it was printable. While I din’t learn much about the printers out in the maker bar through this, I definitely got a refresher on the Objet and on thingiverse as well.

Well gang I’m off to sleep for a few hours before I have to start yet another problem set, but thanks for reading and stay fly.