3d Printing First day!

In another post I mentioned my interest in WarHammer. Well I have jumped into the world of 3D printing. 
In my town the Library offers 3D printing. All I had to do was take a quick one hour course reviewing the printer and the 3D printing process. 

After the course I opened up blender and build a little 2 Gear set up. This was inspired by my tutorial - making gears in blender. Here are the final gears rendered in blender. 

Initial Render Out Of Blender

I exported the object files into out of blender and took my USB to the library. I was pretty excited to get my first print. I worked with a staff member to prepare the files. I had to scale my initial model to 60% as I could only book two hours at a time. 

Final Pieces Put Together

All Three Pieces

This took about 2.5 hours to print (it was a pretty quiet day so they let me use the printer for a little longer). After taking off the extra plastic everything worked well! It was awesome to put the gears together and have them work.
Below are the object files if you want to print this model: 

gear_1.obj
File Size:	60 kb
File Type:	obj

Download File

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gear_2.obj
File Size:	29 kb
File Type:	obj

Download File

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holder_1.obj
File Size:	86 kb
File Type:	obj

Download File

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The main goal of this was to familiarize myself with the process of 3D printing. I wanted to start simple and build from there. Now that I know my work flow I can begin working towards cooler items, and cooler machines.

Somethings I Learned: 

• 3D Printing take a long time! 
• If the program says 1 hour to print it means 2. 
• With better planning I can save a lot of time by leaving negative space in the design. 
  • For example: If the base and the big gear had holes it would have save material. 

If this was my base it would have saved a ton of time.

Let me know if you have any questions!