Okay, so for this project, I used Thingiverse premade prints. This made my life a lot easier, as I spent 0 time designing the print, only preparing it in a slicer software (relative to the printer). Okay, so the first thing that I did was separate “impossible” design into three categories. These being impossible geometric shapes, articulating shapes, or shapes in shapes. The first design I chose was a mech ball in a mesh ball. This had the impossible geometry aspect and the shape in a shape. I tried this many times but I never had a successful print. I tried this shape on the prusa twice and bambu twice.
What I think was happening was that as soon as the second ball would print (very shortly after the first mesh ball) it would knock the other off. Deciding that it was a file issue and not a bed adhesion issue, I moved on to making pokemon snake: ekans. This file was cool and it was an articulated file. I basically printed on every single machine that I could for this print, being the prusa (TPU, Ninja flex, clear pla, pla, and brown pla), sla machine, and bambus. What I will say is even after tuning the prusa (increasing fan speed and slowing the print head) the prusa prints just aren’t as great (more on this to come). So my first prints came out of the bambu, and it was a failure.
The tail of the ekans came off, which really stinks, and the print was a little too big. I had expected the joints of the ekans to rotate and bend more but they didn’t. They wouldn’t budge past a certain point. The scale of the ekans was 40% here, so I went down to 20%. When I did this (on the prusa), the print was a success but it was far too small. I mean it was the size of my finger or smaller.
So I increased the size of the print to 35% of the original size and I printed out 5 prints. I realized that there were also two files that I could print from: a circular pattern of the snake (where it is curled up) or a linear pattern of the snake (where it lies in a line). What I realized was that the prusa would perform better with the line of the snake, because the joints wouldn’t print locked up. This said, the bambu could print the circular pattern of the snake, so I kept it that way. Maybe the line would have done better, but I am unaware, because I saw no need to change something that wasn’t broken.
Okay, at this point, I had a lot of snakes. I had 4 from the prusa (in brown pla, clear pla, tpu, ninja flex, and two in white pla) and one from the bambu. While I had snakes, Only 4 really worked, being 3 from the prusa (the tpu, ninja flex and one white pla ) and the bambu print. The time constraint of the project was boiling down and I wanted to finish. Because I knew that certain prints worked, and others didn’t I went and printed 6 new snakes on the bambu, that way, if any failed, I would still have enough to complete the assignment. I also printed one more snake in TPU because during post processing I messed up the ninja flex snake–I snipped it in half by accident and the ninja flex printer was down so I went with the next best flexible filament. Lastly, I also printed the sla print. Okay, sla is a nightmare. The machine was in use the duration of the project. I got very lucky and four students and I combined our pieces into one file–this means I used the coiled up snake because it was smaller. I knew that my articulated piece wouldn’t work, but I still printed just to do the process.
So I printed the snake and it came out great. Then I let other members of that printing group was their pieces and, as I thought, their articulated pieces fell apart. I think the thing with articulated pieces is that the small connections just wash away in the formwash, which makes sense. Seeing their failure, I left my piece unwashed and deemed the SLA a failure, which I knew going into the process. I put two of the TPU snakes into the gumball machines, one white pla from the prusa, and 2 of the best bambu snakes into gumball machines and called it a day.
Okay, so quick note on failures. There were many. In the final model, the TPU prints just don’t look as good. This is after messing with their print settings and trying to slow the print down a bit, to get smoother layers, but the material leaves a kind of sticky look to the piece. Also, the white pla prusa snake is included because I wanted to show a full perspective of the achievement of this project. That said, the snake is just not as great as the others. It is a little less flexible and I think that is because the articulation joints are a little less precise.
Oh, also, here is a clean print bed on the bambu. I thought it was cool how the prints literally pop or scrape right off so I wanted to include this photo. The same story goes for the prusa, just cool.
For the interesting part of the project, the cost breakdown.
Okay, so this is the cost breakdown. Basically, it is the full cost of everything. Again. like all project, we have a lot of cost that is a one time fee, everything in the materials. This would decrease upon multiple uses. Thing verse and opensource was to the rescue and cut out costs a lot. It is hard to say the exact cost of a snake, but I would pay 50 cents for one. Our cost is much higher right now, because of all of these one cost items. If someone wanted to make a snake business, I would recommend that they make up the initial cost of opening the business by printing very useful things in their 3D printer setup[. These are likely also open source. Hey, maybe there will be another fidget spinner trend in a few years and that could make up the initial cost. For now, the snake is far too expensive.
