GH | Digital Crafts

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Comment by aggadea on February 16, 2016 at 11:00am

cool!!! thanks

Comment by Birk Binnard on February 16, 2016 at 9:24am

You can vapor-smooth PLA using a different chemical.  It is called THF and is rather nastier than acetone.

http://www.protoparadigm.com/news-updates/vapor-smoothing-and-polis...

Comment by aggadea on February 16, 2016 at 8:08am

Oh thanks for your suggestion!

I did tried in some other model acetone to smooth it out, but it needs to be printed in ABS instead of PLA

Comment by Birk Binnard on February 16, 2016 at 8:05am

That came out better than I expected.  And it would be a good candidate for vapor bath finishing. I have not tried that yet but I have seen some very good results. THis part would be an excellent candidate for that.

Comment by aggadea on February 16, 2016 at 3:40am

Here is the sample I 3dprinted with Ultimaker 2.0... as u see not a big problem, yet if I were to scale that up I would have to think in SLS 3d printing obviously

Comment by aggadea on February 15, 2016 at 5:35pm

Hey Birk!
Thanks for the comment, I did actually FDM 3dprinted that piece with no supports since they are small offsets and it came out nice. Another option is to SLS 3D print the piece.

On the other hand, a good strategy for 3dprinting that I also used once is to perforate the geometry in the z, so that u are reducing printing Time, yet not compromising the need for extra supports and adding qualitative value at the same time.

I'll post a pict of the FDM 3dprinted version
Cheers!

Comment by Birk Binnard on February 15, 2016 at 8:19am

That is a fascinating piece - but how to manufacture it? Injection molding would probably work. It would be a real challenge for a 3D printer because of the many horizontal (or nearly so) unsupported areas. Is there a way to make the hole shapes less horizontal - perhaps with a slightly more rounded opening shape?