Between holidays and travel, I haven’t managed to put too much time into my watering project, so here’s a wander into the world of 3d printing to keep your attention.
I travel to Israel for work a few times a year and have thought for a while that I should own a menorah. It being the season for jelly doughnuts, I put in quite a search but everything I came across either seemed tacky and tourist bait or overpriced. “I’m a bit of a DIY guy,” I told myself “I should be able to make one myself!” Why I didn’t immediately think of 3d printing and instead mulled over smelting at home is beyond me. Recently Sparkfun partnered with Ponoko, a fabrication service, and that announcement exposed me to the world of on demand 3d printing.
The process is fairly simple. Create a 3d model following some guidelines based on the material you want to use, upload it to the service pick your finishes and send them money! While initially these services only offered plastics, you can get objects printed in metal or ceramic as well, which is what made this idea so interesting. I’ll prototype in the cheapest plastic then once I’ve got the design to my liking, run it in stainless steel.
Ponoko isn’t the only game in town, but they seemed reasonable & I was interested in a quick and dirty project. I grabbed Google Sketchup after deciding it said “quick and dirty” more to me than Blender and after a small learning curve churned out the design pictured above. A quick disclaimer – this is more about testing the process than designing something perfect – it still needs some iteration.
Here’s where I ran into a minor speed bump. Even after fixing some mesh issues, Ponoko’s site had a bug that caused it to throw a nasty error when I tried to upload my model. Off went an email to their support and I spent some time looking into other services.
After some time on google I came across Shapeways which is currently processing an order for my model. Not only do they appear to be cheaper than Ponoko, they have a wider range of materials available – sandstone and glass jumped out at me as good options for menorah-making. Great thing about it also was the model file I had generated for Ponoko worked without modification and uploading was a breeze. The cheapest material option also happened to be their sandstone which interested me also as a potential final material, so if I like the result I may be done.
Pricing is by the cubic centimeter for 3d printing, not by the overall size or level of detail. As a result with careful planning you could have a huge relatively cheap model by judiciously hollowing out areas where it doesn’t matter. As I’m dealing with cheap materials at first, I haven’t done any optimization so my model weighs in at 23.5 cc’s. With sandstone being $1/cc plus a setup fee, my total came to $25. Now metals with metal at $10/cc and glass at $6/cc, I’ll want to do some carving before printing in something more expensive.
Build time is 10 days + shipping and I’ll post a follow-up once it arrives.