1 of 3
Joy Division
2 of 3
Halfway there
Halfway and all is well.
3 of 3
The end
The affected area, as you can see two or three of the peaks were snapped by the printer's extruder casing.
Welcome to the first #ThingiThursday roundup. Each Thursday we will be selecting an item from thingiverse and attempting to print it, whilst updating you of the progress during the day using our various social media channels.
Today we decided to pick something we felt would be fairly simple and doable in our eight-hour working day. A featured design of the week by University Professor Michael Zöllner of Joy Division’s iconic album cover caught the eye.
The design looked simple yet effective, a 3D representation of a 2D drawing of Radio Waves by Factory Records' Peter Saville.
After downloading the relevant files from thingiverse, we ran them through netfabb. If you’re new to this 3D printing lark, netfabb is an essential tool for checking the STL file's inaccuracies and automatically repairs 95% of problems. This should mean it at least attempts to print.
As a rule of thumb we’re only going to choose files from thingiverse that have been 3D printed by the designer. This at least means it is possible to print; a large proportion of files on thingiverse just won’t print on a deskptop 3D printer.
The printer we’re using here at Personalize is an UP! Plus; it’s a durable little machine, with a decent resolution and a fairly quick print speed. We print in white ABS, and for the purposes of this #ThingiThursday are printing normally. After we exported the part from netfabb to the UP software, a print preview told us it would take three hours so off it went (albeit after a couple of false starts).
All seemed well two thirds into the print as UP sailed along accurately recreating the peaks and troughs of Michael’s design, it was really taking shape. That was until layer 113 of 123, that is.
As the printer was finishing the tops of the highest peaks, the extruder casing caught on the Everest like ranges, snapping them off like Godzilla wreaking havoc on a Japanese city coupled with a rather grim crunching sound to boot. ABORT! The item was so close to finishing until that moment and the two highest peaks were snapped in half, left dangling by a thread.
Nevertheless, even without its two highest peaks it is still, as you can see in the featured pic, a fairly nice looking piece. It is all trial and error in this game, here’s to hoping next week’s #ThingiThursday is more of a success.
If you’ve an idea you’d like us to print for the next #ThingiThursday put the link in the comments box below (we won’t be able to send the print to you), NO GUNS THOUGH!
