3D Printing and Modeling

On Wednesday, I tried to print some better rings will a more reasonable size, taking a chunk of the 4-hour-wide gap between my 3D Printing and Biology class times to develop them. Of course, there were some mishaps as I tried to make this next batch of rings. I accidentally made the size of the first "ring" (if you can even call it that) way too small. The ring in the second photo was torn apart as some of the filament got stuck to the nozzle while it was moving around. At least this next set of rings looks better, in my opinion. There were still some errors with the copper "Peace" ring, as the triangular part was snapped off in the process. However, the white batch of rings came out really well. They were still a bit too small, however, and the spikier rings (the ones on the right in the first and third photos here) could only fit on my pinky fingers.

I had a decent plan with my dragon ring. After learning that applying colors to objects in TinkerCAD does not matter when finally printing those objects, I tried to print the ring twice with two different printers in the lab. The rings would each be printed with different filaments: solid purple and translucent copper. The "pearl" that would be attached to the actual ring piece. However, as I was printing the rings, the sphere for the copper set was immediately being hauled to pieces in the printer. Thankfully, the purple set remained mostly intact. Unfortunately, it was two minutes into the printing process when I realized that I miscalculated the size of my ring. They could only feasibly be worn on a person's thumbs.  The image here shows my final prints. To put it briefly, one printing process was much more successful than the other.

So far, my experiences with TinkerCAD have been very pleasant. I once briefly used this program during my high school years, so I am, at the very least, familiar with the core purpose of the program. The controls feel very simple, if not simpler than my previous experiences. Each of the first 15 tutorial projects is fun to proceed through as well, and I am currently working on a custom ring inspired by the Dragon Ball animation series. The image below shows my work so far. When I am finished tinkering with this, I will be moving on to designing the "rough draft" of my ultimate project.

It is definitely interesting to see how much 3D printing has helped humanity with its various uses and abilities. 3D printing can help develop vehicle parts or recreate lost limbs and organs. I also find it intriguing how people can even make food or parts of furniture using the right polymers, filaments, and/or materials. Another fascinating detail from the report is the sheer scale of the mass production of 3D-printed parts and pieces, and how so many parts and pieces were printed in 2023. I have not looked as much into 3D printing when I was trying it out in my high school days, but now it sounds a lot bigger of a business than I thought.