Prior to this assignment, 3D printing meant winging every step of the process, hoping that the final product would be what I intended. Printing these cubes allowed me to explore every aspect of 3D printing, from the filament to the method to the settings, making me more and more comfortable utilizing this fabrication method.
To start this assignment, I explored Thingiverse with the goal of finding a simplistic, toy-like item that was not based in an articulated body. I wanted to do something different, leading me to picking a toy dump truck with a moveable dump bed. While the truck was incredibly cool, it was a pretty hefty print and would take an hour just to print one. The fidget cube design I ended up with was my second choice, but its 30-minute print time really sold me. Additionally, the design was simple, not requiring many supports or changes to the settings.
The first cube I printed out, to ensure the sizing was correct, broke immediately when I was testing the hinges. Instead of changing my figure again, I sized up the cube, believing that the hinges would strength with the greater size, and printed four iterations, just in case one broke. After almost three hours of printing, my four cubes were complete.
Before I could post-process, I had to snap each cube to loosen its hinges. This process was a bit scary as I thought the pieces were going to break because of the force I needed to apply to make the cube fold as intended. Good news, none of them br0ke!
Overall, the pieces did not require much post-processing. The faces of the cube that were attached to the bed had obvious patterns and therefore needed to be sanded, utilizing the wet-sanding method. Whether this method worked or not is unclear. While I was able to work the patterns out of the surfaces, I was unable to find water-safe sandpaper, meaning the paper I was using was disintegrating with every swipe. Little bits and pieces of sandpaper are still probably sitting in the crevices of those cubes, but I really tried to clean them well, I even washed them in the sink with soap.
The simplicity and ease of 3D printing in FDM on the Bambu Printers, really spoiled me. I should have known that SLA printing was going to be a process, when one of the printers was broken and the line to print was already four-people deep. However, I was optimistic walking into the OEDK at 8 am to get the print stared. Preparing the print was very similar to preparing the FDM prints. Sammy and I shared a printer, and our pieces took three and a half hours to print.
When the pieces were done, we washed, air-blasted, and cured them. However, even after they were cured the pieces were still a bit wet and sticky. As soon as my cubes were removed from the curing machine, I knew they were not going to work. Snapping the hinges into place worked for PLA, but I was not optimistic that the same solution would work for resin. Still, we decided to rewash and recure the pieces. Repeating these steps of the process worked for the stickiness but, did not alleviate the issue of the cubes being unable to move.
My first attempt to loosen the hinges consisted of me wearing down the seams with an Exacto knife and using a rubber mallet to apply force to the area. Not surprisingly, my first resin cube broke. For my second, and final, attempt, I tried to use a pair of pliers to force bending at the hinges, and again the cube broke.
I was very frustrated as I had taken so much time and effort to produce something that was not going to work; however, one of the TA’s assured me that the resin printings were most likely not going to work and were going to break easily.
Outside of small and simple items for my Engi 120 project, I had never successfully 3D printed anything. I am fairly proud of the cubes I printed using the FDM method as they work are a fun to play with, the SLA ones, not so much. In the future, I will happily 3D print something, as long as it does not need to be printed out of resin.
Cost Breakdown: Raw Materials * PLA Aero Filament - $25.00 per 0.82kg spool ($5.00) * 3D Printer Resin - $30.99 per a 1kg bottle ($7.00) Labor * 8 hours x 10.00/hour = $80.00 Tools * 3D Printers owned by the OEDK * Tweezers - $20.00 * Exacto knife - $5.00 * Pliers - $22.00 Total: $139.00
Clean workspace:
