Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m going over a short, but important side project I did this week. Let’s get started.<\/p>\n
So, a few weeks ago, my mother made a request for a simple shirt clip. Using my skills I revived last week, I was able to get a satisfactory one in three prototypes. While learning the modeling software is an important step for me, I do not plan on providing a tutorial myself. When I go back and watch a tutorial, I will give the first lesson a link. What I do want to do is give tips on what I learn on my own.<\/p>\n
The basic concept is a circle with a crossbar. I used a torus and a cylinder to model it in Blender. I didn’t have to go searching for the command to combine meshes, I just had to select both before exporting to a .stl file.<\/p>\n
When it came time to print, the raft was a circle, probably because only the torus was digitally touching the print bed. My first and second prototypes were made from the same, tiny model; Cura saw Blender’s unitless distance in the .stl file as millimeters when I wanted inches. I learned to reliably scale models to a predictable size. When the second prototype came off the bed (the putty knife had a hard time with the uniform curve of the raft) there was this ridge that touched down to the bed. A few rough spots made it unsuitable for use on a shirt without first sanding it.<\/p>\n
The third and current prototype had a model where the cylinder shared a radius with the height of the torus. This created a circle-slash raft, and it didn’t have so many problems with sharp artifacts from its manufacture. I wonder if the second prototype’s ridge on the bottom was an automatic support structure. I’ll need to print something that needs one to find out.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
I have good news and bad news for myself. The good is that I figured out what the extra ridge on the second prototype was. The bad news is that it was a failed part of the print and not a support structure. I programmed up what looked like a lopsided sphere on a stick and told Cura to print it with and without a support structure. The only difference was that I got a raft with the shadow of the print instead of the contact point of it.<\/p>\n
Final Question: I have heard about support structures sometimes being printed out of a different material. Are they ever printed like a raft you can peel off and sand down when needed?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m going over a short, but important side project I did this week. Let’s get started. So, a few weeks ago, my mother made a request for a simple shirt clip. Using my skills I revived last week, I was able to get a … <\/p>\n