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Showing posts from April, 2019

Making Custom Brims for Difficult Parts

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I decided to print out a couple of  Stian Wahlvaag's Surprise Eggs  to put in my kids' Easter baskets this year.  I went with the excavator because A) it's got a lot of fun moving parts, and B) it's an excavator, and who doesn't love excavators? I got the eggs to print just fine on my first try, but the excavator itself gave me some troubles.  All of the mechanical bits worked great, but one part of the bumper kept failing.  That one spot had a very small footprint, so it kept getting knocked loose during the print.  It took me several attempts to get things worked out for a successful print, but it also gave me a chance to work on designing a custom brim to help print small footprint objects!  Here's a photo of the one that finally worked next to an older attempt (with a much smaller custom brim) that failed: So, here's how I made my custom brim.  First, I opened up Blender and imported the model.  Then, I pressed Numpad 5, Numpad 1  to get a look at