Tag Archives: 3d printing

DROGON Update: 3D Printing

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After watching some failed print attempts (see above photo), I was concerned that my print would have many unforeseen complications. But, overall, it went fairly well. I had to restart twice because the filament got tangled, but otherwise the print went smoothly and took about 3.5 hours.

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My dad sometimes tells the story of the first time he used a fax machine, and how astounding it was at the time. I feel that my experience printing Drogon was similar, and that one day, in a not-so-distant future where 3D printing  will be ubiquitous, the memory of the confusion and excitement of my first print will deeply amuse me. I’m excited to be at a point where I feel more comfortable utilizing the 3D printer and I’m curious to see how I will apply this tool later on in studio.

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Removing the scaffolding proved very tedious but ultimately doable. An alternative strategy I might have used would be to print the head and body separately (and reduce the amount of scaffolding needed). My rationale was that I wanted to make sure the model could stand upright and was hoping that the Tinkerine suite software would calculate the weighting if I printed it as once piece. This could have been something to explore in multiple prints.

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Lessons learned:

-Don’t scale in Tinkerine. Also, having consulted with various classmates, it appears that Tinkerine has a tendency to tamper with scale, or just that variations in scale happen across a variety of printers. But still, scale in Rhino into mm before importing into Tinkerine.
-Though this is probably obvious, it warrants stating: I would’ve done a test print of the model beforehand. There were time constraints and issues with the printers, but I waited until I was done modelling to 3D print. In hindsight, I would’ve printed a crappy rough prototype ahead of time to troubleshoot some things (ie scaling) proactively.