3D Printing and At-Home Fabrication Tips

I just recently made my Gloomhaven Cave Bear model , which needs to be printed in two pieces because of the details around the bear's teeth.  When I was cutting the model to be printed, I realized that I was going to need a post to help guide the head into place (otherwise it was really difficult to line up the fur), which got me thinking about the whole post-and-slot design for situations like this. When I've done similar cuts in the past, I put the post directly on one half and cut the cavity into the other half... and that worked great, as long as I got my tolerances correct.  When I failed to get them right, I was stuck either reprinting the part with the post (after making the post slightly smaller) or the part with the cavity (after making it slightly larger).  Either way, I had to reprint a fair amount of the model.  I noticed this problem even more when I was printing a model that someone else had pre-cut.  He had cut it with a 5% tolerance, which so...

When I'm generating supports for a relatively simple shape, such as something like a shelf that juts out to the side, I'll use the default Slic3r support material  When making something complicated, like a miniature, those supports just don't quite cut it.  Literally, in this sense, as the times when I've used those supports, I've ended up with a solid block of material and I gave up part-way through the task of cutting my model out of it.  So, I guess that technically, I couldn't cut it... but the point stands. I like to use Meshmixer to generate support for my miniatures.  I like it so much, that I wrote a guide specifically about how to generate support material with Meshmixer , which covers many of the details that I'd originally planned on putting in this post! One thing that I didn't discuss there was cutting a model.  I usually prefer using support material to print the bits of my minis that could otherwise not be printed... but sometimes, I h...

In my model cutting for 3d printing post, I mentioned that I like to use trapezoids for alignment keys.  Why is that?  6 axial alignment, bro. Ok, that phrase is a bit ridiculous, but when I took notes on my concept for this post, that's all I wrote down... and it's kindof true.  An isosceles trapezoid gives you keying on all 6 axes, whereas most other simple shapes (like squares, rectangles or circles) generally only provide absolute positions on 5 of them.  What am I talking about, when I mention 5 vs. 6 axes? Do you remember when the PS3 came out with its new Sixaxis controller?  At the time, I scoffed, thinking that we live in a 3 dimensional world and so there are only 3 axes, commonly called X, Y, and Z.  Therefore, this whole "six axis" thing was obviously just a marketing gimmick meant to make it sound more high tech.  Well, younger me was certainly wrong about that! I was  right that there are only 3 axes, but what I didn't think a...

One of my coworkers asked me to print a Naruto styled Kunai for a shadow box for his son.  We hit up Thingiverse and found that model, which he liked, so I told him that it would be no problem to print.  And it wasn't, because I have the tools to cut the model to make it no problem to print. First, let's think about what I'd get if I decided to print that kunai as-is.  It's got that nice rounded handle and a tapered blade, so there's barely any contact with the print bed.  If I just tried to print it, I'd get a few mm2 of well adhered plastic on the bed, then a fair amount of spaghetti to either side of it as the printer tries to print in thin air. Obviously, that won't work, but we can set up supports and even rafting!  The raft will cause the printer to print the kunai's silhouette on the bed, then print up from there.  That'll give me great bed adhesion, and then it'll print support material as needed to print the curved and tapered p...