Friday, 21 November 2008

Hat Rack

I came across this object designed by Gorg Huff in the RepRap objects wiki. It was such an interesting organic shape, completely different from anything else I have printed, that I had to try it.



It was a bit too big for my machine so I scaled it down and printed it diagonally.



It took about 4 hours plus an hour for the raft. Because the sides slope in quite quickly, Skeinforge switches to 100% fill for a lot of the layers because the edges don't have anything two layers above them. This can be fixed by selecting 3 extra shells on sparse layers. That means the infill starts far enough from the edge to have something two layers above it. You get a stronger object with less plastic that way.
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2 comments:

  1. Vladimir Nesov21 November 2008 at 20:56

    Looking at the profile of the detail, and the fact that it took an hour to print the raft: maybe most of it can be left out, printed much more scarcely, with only part under and around the detail printed in full?

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  2. nophead21 November 2008 at 21:10

    Yes that is what commercial machines do but I am a lazy programmer! I just calculate the bounding box of the first layer and expand it. I should find all the outlines in the first layer and expand those and work out a zigzag that will fill them.

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