3D Printing

 Hello everyone. Today I will be talking about my learning experience with 3D printing.

Firstly, we will have to design an object that cannot be easily made subtractively. This essentially means that the design should be made additively—in such a way that the flow of the filament from the extruder should be continuous with minimum stoppages.

With this, I decided to make a beer bottle. Not saying that I drink, but I find that the shape of the beer bottle very unique and attractive as it is not like the modern day bottles where it is focused on being ergonomically designed. It is considered cannot be made easily  subtractively as it does not have a symmetric design from bottom to up. And the inside of the bottle is hollow like an actual bottle.

We can design this using fusion 360

I googled a picture of a beer bottle and downloaded it as I will need it as a reference later on.

Once opened, we press on the “assemble” drop down option and create new component, from there we will name it “bottle” because its essentially what it is LOL.

We will then press the insert dropdown, and press canvas

From there we will choose our image and select the Z-X plane.

We will then resize it to to 1.00 for each dimension for now.

Now we will need to calibrate the image.

Firstly, press the dropdown for the canvas component. 

 

Right click the image from the canvas dropdown, and select calibrate

Make sure that we are facing directly in front of the image. By pressing the cube on the top right hand corner.

To calibrate, select the bottom corner of the image and the top corner of the image. A dimension box will appear, and we will set it to 240mm.

We will now start to trace out the beer bottle. Firstly, press L and click on the Z-X plane.

Click the centre of the top of the bottle, and draw a straight line all the way to the bottom. With the command still active,type in 30mm and make sure its 90° to the right. Press “tab” to lock the dimension in place. After that, go 90° up and type in 134mm for the length and again press tab to lock it in place. We should end up with something like this:

To sketch the remaining curvatures of the right side of the bottle we would have to use a different approach. Click on the sketch drop down and select “point”. This allows us to create a sketch point everytime we click on our mouse. We will then put points on the reference where the curvature of the bottle starts to change with even spacing. Like this:

To connect the points, we will have to use the “spline” option, and click on each point individually.

In this case, we will be using fit point spline. And hit enter.

We can make fine adjustments with the spline points and the green lines.

After that, we connect the last point of the curve to the top of the centre of the bottle.

The shape of the right side of the bottle will be highlighted aka it has become a closed profile

To make this shape a 3D, we will have to use a feature called “revolve”. Click on  the create dropdown and select revolve.

Click on the axis and select the inside straight line of the bottle

The blue line

We can then see the 3D version of the bottle

All that is left to do is to make the bottle smoother and to make it hollow. Click on Fillet, and we will then make a rounded edge to the bottom of the bottle. Click the bottom of the bottom and key in 5mm. Click the top of the bottle to make the top of the bottle smoothe. And key in 1mm.

We want to make the top of the bottle have a constant dimension. Therefore we will open up the sketch by clicking the sketch icon in the timeline. Press D on the keyboard and press the top line. Key in 7.8mm

Once done, we can make the body of the bottle hollow.

Click on the dropdown of modify. And click on shell then click on the body of the bottle in the browser. And key in 3mm and click ok. To see if our bottle is hollow, we can use the section analysis tool.  Click on the inspect dropdown and click on section analysis

We click on the Z-X plane so that we can see the cross section of the bottle

Press ok. And press the letter C on the keyboard. And select the top face of the bottle—this will be what you observe:

Click on the centre of the origin and drag out, key in 14mm and enter.

Click extrude. Change the operation to cut, and the extent type, “to object”

And click on the bottom side of the top of the bottle

And click ok. This will be the mouth opening of the bottle

We need to smoothen the mouth opening—therefore we will need to fillet. Press F on the keyboard and click the inner edge of the mouth opening. Specify it to have a fillet of 2mm.

And with that we are done with the design !

From here , we exported the file from fusion in stl format and inserted it into ultimaker cura. From there we can see everything that is related to 3D printing the actual product—how much filament is being used, how much time, how heavy it is etc. in this case, we were given only approximately 1 hour to make our design come to life. Initially, my product was supposed to take 9 hrs. I then rescaled the product on my fusion 360, and in the ultimaker cura. After much playing around with the scales, my product only takes 1hr and 9mins to print out.

Here is me drinking from the beer bottle even though I dont drink:D :

Reflection:

In this experience, I learnt that 3D printing is a long and tedious process. This is because, depending on what product and how big it is etc, this process may take hours, in addition to the early deciding and designing stages. I also learnt how to scale my products, previously my product was supposed to take 9 hours to produce, but this is only because it was too big. I had to figure out a way to make it smaller and resize it. It was a problem for me because I did not use the parameter function. So I did some research and found out that there is a way to rescale the product as a whole without the need to use parameters. Which is by the “scale” function on fusion. From there, I played around with the decimals and kept exporting it multiple times to the cura ultimaker. Until my friend told me that I could have rescaled my product from cura itself(LOL).