playing with my 3D printer

[Mark S Anderson]

Doodled a bit in fusion, and made a lock bezel and some letters. These will probably end up on my toolbox, but they'll need to be resized up and flattened because they are fender letters. Anyway, it was a fun little build, and they look damn cool. The bezel still needs work, the hole in the center isn't big enough for the lock on my box, and I have to change the gcode to make it solid where it pivots and add a rotation stop. Then i'll be able to share the .stl file, if anyone is interested.

[Mark S Anderson]

I didn't notice the missing divider line at the bottom until now.  I guess I have more work to do....

[Jason Edge]

Looks great!  Having zero experience with 3D scanning and printing, what is the processes in layman's terms?  I'm assuming the the pieces get 3D scanned then printed?  When you say "Doodled a bit in fusion" I'm all blanks. Fusion to me just means combining something.   I'm definitely a dummy on this subject.

[Mark S Anderson]

Unfortunately I don't have a scanner so I had to make it 'from the ground up'.  Fusion 360 is a CAD program by Autodesk that's free to use (for hobbyists or students anyway) and is a fully functioning pro-level design platform.   It's great, even though I'm new to it and self teaching as I go.  I drew them up from scratch, the process goes like this:  upload  pictures of the part (2d) and calibrate it so the drawing is exactly the same size as the piece you're making.    You basically trace out the details of the picture into a 2d sketch.  Then, you create a 3D body by 'extruding' that sketch into a third axis.   Since the letters and crest only have detail on one face, they're easy to model.   The letters took about five minutes apiece to draw up, once I had the critical angles and measurements from the first one.

[Jason Edge]

Sounds like as long at the back is flat and it gets progressively smaller as you come out on the Z-axis it would be a good candidate. I would like to see what you could do with our Chapter Logo.. the round one, with our without the outer circle.

[Mark S Anderson]

Jason,  
It could easily be made into a lithophane, which is a translucent print that lights up from behind, there's a converter online for any image at lithophanemaker.com.  It would look like this:Just using the .jpeg from the site, that's the easy way, but lithos take a long time (like a day of printing nonstop) because they have to be printed upright and slow.  I'm not gonna do that lol.  You could take the impression and make a coin or keychain or something simple, but the digital noise in the jpeg will make uploading it to a cad program take a lot of time.  Someone with a much faster computer and paid subscription to a program like blender would be more up to that task.   

[Jason Edge]

hmmm. perhaps a future consideration as the tech improves and costs go down!

[Tony and Ginny 429]

 Mark

The very first time viewing what a 3 D printer has made although I have herd the term before 

An amazing experience that I would love to know a lot  more about 

Do you need special skills  of some kind to work the printer ?

How does one acquire such a device ?

Enjoy 

[Mark S Anderson]

No real skill required to work the printer, except you have to be very open to tinkering if you want to spend less than a thousand.  I run an Ender 3, which cost about $250 retail from Amazon, but it doesn't come with any support at all and needs to be adjusted each time it prints.  You have to know how to use it before you buy, and be patient and really you have to enjoy the process as a whole or it will just collect dust in your attic after a few trial prints.   Also it needs some upgrades to run some of the most useful materials, but we buy them because the upgrades are out there for cheap and the machine has a great foundation.  
Prints take a long time, the crest took 4 hours, the letters about 15 minutes apiece, and the plastic is basically the same as a revell model, not very useful, but you can make a mold of your print(or print the mold) and cast them in urethane or metal if you like.  

[Russ Austin]

If you could adjust the trunk lock bezel to take a 63 lock, it would be a game changer for the 64 folks.

[Mark S Anderson]

Russ, 
I'm sure it would be very easy to model if I knew what the problem was, and I had both years' locks in my hands.  If it's a problem that plastic could solve, it would take about an evening of design.   If it had to be cast in pot metal and plated, it would take a lot longer