Week 1 - Journal

This week's assignment had two parts which are to choose a design that can be made by using the Laser cutting machine and another one to be made using the 3D printer.

The first designs I thought about are designs from anime, movies or cartoons that I watched before or I want to watch so I chose Totoro from "My neighbour Totoro" and the amazing Madara Uchiha mangakyou sharingan eye from "Naruto Shippuden".

As for the laser cutting design, I made it copying the drawing from the anime.

The open library source for the 3D design is here.

The source for the 2D design is here.

What I learnt from the good people in the lab:

• Using support blocker feature

• Solving some problems happened with lasercutting.

• Just a question!!!

• Removing the supports from the printed thing after printing.

Using support blocker feature:

I asked if there a way to remove the unwanted supports to rescue the figure from scratches after removing these supports so the Lab specialist/instructor Noha showed me the Support blocker feature and I used it it saved 1 gram^^ and the figure from more scratches.

Solving some problems happened with lasercutting:

The problem:

The machine didn't cut the fully scanned part and some of those parts didn't come off so I showed this to Instructor Mohanad and he showed me a trick to solve this problem.

The solution:

The solution was to edit the perimeter colour and make it (cut) black and only make the wanted perimeters to the black colour and colour the rest (already done) with whatever colour and make their output NO.

Just a question!!!:

While I was waiting for the 3D printed figure Totoro to be done I asked if there is a way to make 3D printing more industrially productive, instructor Mohanad showed me what PRUSA did to do that and sent me a link for that and it is here.

Removing the supports from the 3D printed thing after printing:

I was having a very hard time to remove the supports out of the design and I really did some noticeable scratches as you can see.... so I asked for what I can do to make these support a little bit less sticky.....unfortunately I didn't have the chance to know this great person but I am really thankful...

He told me that in the custom settings there an option (Support Z Distance) that you can use to make a kind of distance between the object and the support.

Almost all the challenges were mentioned in the section above (Community of learning)

The challenges that I faced weren't that big of a deal in the laser cutting design but when it comes to the 3D printing I was afraid to damage my first printed thing ever but you can't undo something like doing so much scratches while taking of the supports out of the design....

The solution:

It was mentioned earlier which is to use the Support Z Distance option.

I can use this 0.1 of experience which will increase through out this Diploma to quite perfect the usage of a laser cutting machine and a 3D printer to produce a quite good final project.