Monday, December 17, 2018

3D Printing - Glow in the Dark School Keyring

Challenge: To use Glow-In-The-Dark 3D Printed Filament in a meaningful and creative way to produce a range of short term prints. 
Background: Completing the run of decorations based around Christmas Decorations for the past few weeks we wanted to move in the direction again of using Glow-In-the-Dark (or liumious PLA depending on the branding) to create an effect.    As such we targeted a couple of simple ideas that we have visited in the past, a keyring and a small badge, with the effect created by the filament to compensate for the basic nature of the design.    The student themselves initiaed the idea, a larger print was planned but the printing using the filament was not successful - the print was in the twenty five hour range and after one to two hours it was apparent the PLA would not produce a clean finish.  Level of Difficulty: Low- the idea here is to mass produce something relatively small that will show some creativity for visitors to the school that we can give them as a gift.  We also will tailor made the gift depending on the circumstances to represent local businesses or schools that might visit or we might have interaction with.   The basic design is very straightforward with a basic shape and simple lettering a hole placed for connection the kind of filament of course is the simple 'x factor' related to the print, Glow-In-the-Dark filament is something we've experienced some success with in the past.
Time Frame: Three Hours - the intention is to mass produce these as school related gifts and therefore the idea was to minimise the size - the object in question is designed to create a stir and the filament choice is the primary way to do so.
Size: Again - delibrately chosen as something that we are mass producing as a basic gift.  We therefore wanted to balance the purpose with the keyring being practical but not too large.  It was 5mm thick and was a square that was 50mm across and 50mm high. 
What we would do differently/Next Steps for Students: Having experienced using Glow-In-the-Dark filament before we are intending to run it through to the end of the spool and produce the same print repeadtely.   This is because after experiencing it in the past we have found information that shows it needs to be sealed when not on the machine.   If you don't then it degrades quickly and we want to utilize it as much as possible before this process occurs. 

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