Exploring 3D Printing

Ontario is humid. I knew this.

But, it didn’t quite occur to me that this would be a problem with my first forays into 3D printing. I had no clue.

I calibrated the printer bed, got the filament setup, did the requisite test prints - no problem. Then there was 55% humidity indoors.

The infill for the first base of the braiding table was way too open, and, I wasn’t paying attention to realize that there was bubbling and stringing going on. So I scrapped that print, changed the infill to a denser gyroid pattern, and things were going great! Or so I thought.

A few failed prints & discarded reel of PLA filament later, I finally got a dry storage box which kept the filament between 10% - 17% and things went better from there. I was able to print the twelve bobbins (100% infill because I needed them to be weighted), and all the parts for the kumihimo braiding table done (25% gyroid infill), and I’m super happy with how sturdy things are!

Also, I owe the speed of my summer explorations to Animedia who, most thankfully, had a Kumihimo Marudai file available when the thought struck me that it would be nice to have a braiding table of my own. I scaled the project down to ~65% of the original. The original can be found here: Traditional Marudai for Kumihimo ( Japanese Braid ).

Now on to the actual kumihimo braiding!

( ᐛ )و

Pictured are some of the failed prints; a blurry phone shot of my Ender3 churning out the disk; and the temperature & humidity reading from the PolyBox which saved my project (& possibly my sanity).