I started a 3d printing tutorial yesterday. I haven’t learned to implement much yet, but did see some things people made.
The printer looks like a combination of an oven, an inkjet printer, and a man-sized safe. You put a tray into the printer and the head moves around like an inkjet head, laying a spiderweb of plastic in a zig-zag. It can lay the plastic in any color you have material for, but it also lays a black support plastic. The support plastic is used to fill in holes that would otherwise cause the object to collapse. After printing completes, you soak the object in lye to disolve the support plastic, leaving just the original model. The printer lays down plastic 1/3000th of an inch thick, so it may take several hours to fabricate.
The lab already made one object, a large cup. It’s made of white plastic and apparently is waterproof. They also showed us a tray that was interrupted halfway while making two cups. One cup was made standing upright and didn’t need any of the black support material. The other was made on it’s side and needed lots of support material so it didn’t collapse on itself during fabrication. The moral of the story is that we don’t just design 3d models, but we must also consider how they are made. This isn’t just printing webpages on your office laserjet!
