3D Printed Earrings - In Three Minutes!

 

Challenge: Student wanted to create a 3D pair of earnings designing them using the printer.

Background: This student has strong ideas and creativity and has been responsible for a series of significant prints that have been shared via this blog in the past two years.    They also have a small side business selling and designing jewellery.   She has been talking for a while about using the 3D Printer to design items of jewellery and follow it being fixed attempted a basic design.  She came to the process with a strong design idea about what would would, what it might look like and the dimensions that she wanted.

The issue with the print was simply the design process and having the student using a different medium.   She presently used clay and bakes it - using the 3D Printer allows her to work with a different medium.    The initial print in this series was constructed and printed in eight minutes for both earrings.  The design was based on pac man, from the Pac man game.  Tinkercad was used to create the design, a small emphasis was placed on using a circle to locate the eye and a hole was made for the earring links.

The printer being used for this project is the Ultimaker 2+ with a 8mm nozzle and standard PLA.

Level of Difficulty: Low - this is a very simple design that translated well in the first stage to a design.    Other than the mounting of the hole inside the design there was a small degree of difficulty.

Size: 40mm across and 3mm thick.   This is the first exploratory print using the printer to design earrings and the student will come with a variety of sizes that will follow.

Timeframe: Six minutes - that is a total print time with a 20% infill - making this quite possibly the shortest and smallest print that has been ever featured on this blog in six years.   The potential for this is huge, as an entire class of students could easily complete the project in a short time frame.

What we would do/next steps for the students: This is the first in what one would expect to a large number of projects.  The student is intending to spray paint the earrings yellow, to make sure that it is clearly visible as a Pac Man and then either apply black paint with a small brush or use vivid.   The student is going to spend time researching the original figure and then adjusting the print to reflect features such as the mouth and its angle, position of the eye and then position of the hole for the attachment.   The student is also going to look at the infill - this has the standard infill of 20% and the intention is to try different levels of this to modify the print.

This potentially would be a great class project given that individual design students could complete the entire print in under ten minutes.