Monthly Archives: December 2014

The Devil’s in them

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Boy!  4 months pass by quickly when you have a new toy to play with.  We’ve hit the ground running with a number of exciting projects that I’ll post about in the upcoming few days, but I do need to focus for a moment (if for nothing than to get the idea out of my brain) about trouble shooting.

At its core the 3D printer is a fancy hot glue gun with a motor attached to it.  Think about that for a second; nice and simple right?  Draw a cross-section of something, let it cool, and then raise up and draw the next cross section on top of it, and repeat.  Done and done, time to go to bed.  Understanding a successfully printed thing is dependent upon the expectations of quality on behalf of the user.  Hand a print back to someone that asked for a model to be 3D printed, and you can almost read their face:

“Why does it look so stringy?”
“I though the roof would be smoother.”
“Wow that took a long time!
“Why did it loose so much detail?”

Trying to meet those expectations is when the fun new toy turns into a very tediously annoying tool.
Let’s go back to my hot glue gun analogy.  I encourage you to try this at home with a parent’s supervision kids.  Draw a circle on a piece of paper using a compass (or trace a plate if you have one handy)  now put an even bead of hot glue all the way around on that line…  It’s there, but it isn’t all that pretty.  Did you move too quickly?  Was the glue not hot enough? Was the nozzle too far away from the paper?  Did your hand wobble? Were you drawing too quickly? Etc, etc, etc…  you see where I’m headed, right?  A cube printed at one temperature is going to look different and take longer than the exact same cube at another temperature (just like temp on the glue gun).  Controlling all of these variables with the printer can become overwhelming, and impossible to tackle all at the same time.  If you’re printing for the first time, find where it is whithin your software that these variables are listed.  Take time to test all of these variables out, or align yourself with a community that already has.  You’ll be glad you did.