3D Printing

To begin with he showed me the software of how you take a file from Solidworks into an stl. file into the Ultimaker software which you then can manoeuvre into the position that will best print it and gives you all of the details of how you want it to be printed and the cost of materials etc. all of this software kind of brought the project down to earth to give me an understanding of a cost of materials, how much it will use and the time it will take. Now he had showed me the best way to print it he put the file on a usb stick and plugged it into the printer.

For the next bit he gave me a demonstration on how you remove the material and place a new in the machine. He then showed me how to start a print and told me we need to keep an eye on it in case something goes wrong and how to then fix that issue. About 30 minutes I saw that the scaffolding wasn’t printing properly and this was because the nozzle wasn’t getting the material to a high enough temperature. After we fixed this we let it carry on and everything was ok.

Overall learning the design method was really useful as it has taught me a lot I didn’t previously know about costs, method and time it takes to print. Since it was done to a high quality, it can take days to print a single piece of my artefact so it has also grown my patience as there is nothing you can do with it other than make sure it doesn’t go wrong.