First time 3D printing, very good experience. I measured the gumball capsule and took my best guess the scale the model to 75% of the original, which worked out great in the end.
That aside, putting in the default values given from the assignment was straightforward enough. The 5th Bambu printer was having trouble receiving the file, and no one was able to figure out how to send it. I ended up using a different printer and everything went well.
I forgot to clean off the calibrating lines from whoever last printed on the bed, and I was slightly concerned that it would mess things up but the final product from the Bambu printer looks great.
The Prusa printer on the other hand, had a more difficult UI and it took a bit to get everything put onto the SD card and get the machine to print. It was slower, and the quality was slightly worse. Nonetheless the prints still looked fine, and after trimming off the support and cleaning up a bit the impossible objects looks good.
In terms of post processing, the objects came out pretty clean so I only sanded the support residue off of the sphere. I am sightly scared to do anything else to the tetrahedral structures since they looked and felt pretty fragile.
Overall I would say this was a quick project. I know there were people that spent many hours waiting for the objects to print, but mine only took about 2 hours for either of the machine.
Much later as I write this, I realized that the design file contains 2 separate files, with one being the top 10% of the sphere that I can print and then glue onto the sphere to complete it…. I am going to blame it on the French description…
Either way, breaking down the cost:
For the print material, the total weight was only 30 g. At an average of 0.025 per gram, the 6 prints only cost 75 cents. For 0.125 a price to make, there is a 50% profit margin if the gumball machine only takes quarters.
Labor time is honestly pretty short if I knew what I was doing. I spent most of the time trying to navigate to various things and trying to connect a printer. Sure 2 machines ran for 2 hours, but those were unsupervised hours.
