Printing! In 3D!
After years of wishes, Santa Claus finally brought me a 3d printer. I guess when the price of a good printer fell under $250, there just was no reason to say no anymore! The printer I got was a Creality Ender 3.
The printer came unassembled so I spent about an hour putting it together. It was straightforward and I was really impressed by its quality. I told Merike several times that I couldn't believe the price.
After I put it together, I started printing the test file it came with - a goofy puppy statue. Everything was going great until the printing material the printer came with ran out around the puppy's belly button.
I ordered some Hatchbox PLA and was back in business.
I wanted to print something for the kids and started with an S-shaped box for Sassu. While the priting of the box was fun to watch, when it was over, Sassu said, "Honestly, I have to say that I don't really like the box." Oh, well!
For Ella, I found a letter E that had little drawers built into it. I started printing it and was surprised to see it was going to take 20 hours! (3D printing is a little slow.) About 10 hours in, I realized that the printer was going to have to print the top part of the shelf in mid air. How was it going to do that? The answer I learned was "poorly." That's when I learned about supports and Ultimaker Cura.
I printed out a few more things for the kids but I was really anxious to put the printer to some practical use. The first project I had in mind was some mounts for our outdoor lights. Our house has clapboard siding which makes it challenging to mount lights to and whoever installed ours was not up to that challenge. The lights were just hanging off their screws and not flush against the exterior.
My idea was to build a mount that would be flat on one side and shaped to fit the clapboards on the other side. To design this, I used the free version of SketchUp - a tool that I had used years ago when Google owned it to design a 3D version of the Watson QA pipeline architecture as a present for Dave Ferrucci. The tool is very intuitive and I find it pretty easy to realize waht I want to build. In this case, I also installed a few plugins like Solid Inspector2 to make sure my solids were solid and an STL exporter to produce files that Cura could use.
I wanted the print to be able to survive the outdoor elements and so I decide I would do it in ABS plastic. I ordered some made by Inland because Hatchbox was sold out. Expecting this to work as well as the PLA material, I loaded it up and started printing. It didn't work at all!
Searching online, I tried different temperatures for the extruder and the print bed but still no luck. But I also kept seeing that people recommended building an enclosure for the printer. Well, I had a cardboard box and some glass and so I built one. And lo and behold, that made all the difference.
I decide to print the frames in two parts because I found it pretty annoying to carve off the support material. To attach the parts, I bought some ABS cement. And in the end, I was pretty happy with the results. (They're not perfect though; I didn't accurately judge how that mounting position of the lights would change when they rotated to be plumb.)
What next? Well, it was Ella's birthday and we redid her room in a Harry Potter theme so that inspired me to make a wand holder to mount to here wall.