3d printing experiments

[Kirl]

I made my first 3d prints recently! Keychains for my fellow translators at Duolingo and a gold trohy for the staff. I presented them at a dinner we had together in Amsterdam recently. I'm pretty pleased with the results but got lots of improvements for next time.

The keychains were printed in solid color sandstone, which was very rough and seemed quite brittle. After a number of coats of clear varnish they were very smooth and seemed a lot more durable.

The trophy is hollow, printed in plastic and spraypainted gold. Unfortunatly the gold paint was very fragile and couldn't be painted over with anything else. I was going for a perfectly smooth mirror surface, but it seems this can't be achieved with just a gold paint, no matter how smoothly applied. I even made 4 nice little dutch flag pouches, from a coupe of cheap wrappers for the side mirrors of a car.

Below are some pics I made throughout the entire process, turns out I documented the whole thing pretty well! 

[Gore Motel]

Looks great! How did you do the 3D printing and how fine can the details on the models be?

[Hotshot]

Whoa 

I will buying 3D Printer one day when the price is affordable !!!

[Kirl]

I had the models printed by Shapeways here in Eindhoven, details depend on the material used but they have integrated a nice little tool in the submition process that checks and highlights potential problem areas. The engraved text on the little plaque kind of blended together at points, so it was just within boundaries of the material. For the trophy I did a number of correction rounds before it was accepted. However they do offer a "print it anyway" option at the risk of crappy results.

One obvious but unexpected thing I ran into is that volumes (and thus material used) increase very fast. It's a lot cheaper to make it hollow but requires more work and attention, as well as 1 or more drain holes from which the unused material can be extracted.

I would love to buy a 3dprinter at some point and I have been thinking of building my own, but I fear that even with all the online resources it will be too much of a hassle and learning curve still. Shapeways will do for now. 

[combatking0]

This looks like it would be great for building cubic fractals

[Kirl]

I tried printing some smaller details using our lovely DBF logo. Even though I got a warning on the smallest version (around 1x1 inch), all details came out nicely.

Below is a pic of the raw print, I'll coat them with a couple of layers of varnish for durability wich will give it a very smooth look and feel. I thought I could maybe give some away for the next challenges.

[Hotshot]

Excellent