My wife makes great 3D cake creations. You can see her stuff at http://frazicake.wordpress.com To make the cakes stand up, she needs to use dowels (sticks). But, it's trouble getting those sticks to stand up.
So, I designed & printed some simple adapters to allow the dowels to fit into a shaft just the right size, which can then be screwed into a platform.
The first iteration worked just fine! The fit was snug.
So, now, just copy the design into an array & print a set of 15 in one shot!
Doh! The plastic got stuck in the pipes! No more prints for a bit.
You might see some of the red ABS plastic stuck in this part. It's called the "Thermal Barrier" and it fits above the hot nozzles that squirt out the plastic, and below the stepper motors that feed the filament into the nozzle.
Here's a bottom's up view, with the nozzle removed, where you can see the red plastic stuck up in there :(
So, what to do? Take it all apart & soak this in an acetone bath. ABS plastic dissolves in a few hours in acetone, or at least gets soft enough to clean out that gunk easier.
Success! It took patience in taking it apart, cleaning it, reassembling it, and calibrating the sensitive leveling all over again. But, it's worth it to be back on-line & printing again!
Here we are, happily playing with our new custom, personalized, "makerbot printed", board game pieces in my son's latest favorite game (Star Wars Monopoly).
My son made a custom token with lots of "Win", his name, & cones/spheres to use to dominate the next games.
My daughter saw that, & of course, had to request that her brother also make one for her, but smaller, &, with her name, & lots of "win" "win" "win" on it.
I printed a simple spiral using the golden ratio / fibonacci sequence. If you haven't seen Donal Duck's Mathematics by Disney, I highly recommend you pull up your kids & spend 8 minutes here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVODhFLe0mw.
For those curious about MakerBot limitations, notice how the bottom is peeling off the platform. This is caused by cooling/contraction of the bottom as the top, hot printing still is ongoing. This is in spite of the ABS+acetone bonding layer which you can see, is still trying (unsuccessfully) to pull the bottom down, leaving strands.
The first dragon came out "ok" for 20 minutes worth of design by an engineer who's a very lousy artist.
Here's the 2nd iteration of the dragon, a bit better.
It's nice to see it as it prints, building one layer at a time. As it builds the wings, it almost looks like it's tickling the part as it prints it.
Here's the latest lil' dragon, with spikes on his back, feet to keep him standing up, and a new color!
Sadly, this is very common.
We intend to print a nice part, but it ends up looking like spaghetti!
What happens is, if the bottom of the part slips from the position on the platform, the printing on top will just print into open space, and string along the plastic like spaghetti.
Every mistake is an opportunity to learn, and we're doing lots of this mistake+learn here with the MakerBot.
What we've found works well to avoid this spaghetti is:
"The Tower", revision 2
My son continues to learn the power of iterative design. (Imagine, design, build, evaluate/learn, redesign). And, we love how the MakerBot shortens the iteration from weeks to hours. Here, he designed a more complex "tower" for his monopoly upgrades.
Here he is, excited & proud to see it getting built.
Here he is, happy with the results, showing the design & him holding the physical part
