Week 2
In this week I came up with my design concept and I did my first print.
Last updated
In this week I came up with my design concept and I did my first print.
Last updated
Lately, I've come across a lot of articles and pictures pointing out the lack of snow this winter. I really like to do alpine skiing but due to climate change in the resulting warmer-than-usual temperatures, a lot of ski piste appear to be just a white stripe on a green field of grass this year. This inspired me to create a snowflake-like shape to serve as a snow motif in nature.
I came up with the idea of creating shapes similar to snowflakes. Snowflakes seemed like a good starting since they have symmetric geometrical structures.
(https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/01/19/wilson-bentley-snowflakes/, accessed on 21.01.2023)
After looking up some images of different types of snowflakes I abstracted the shape to the hexagon. This is going to be the first type of shape I want to print. I also want to already create a mechanism to attach two shapes together.
For CAD I decided to use Tinkercad due to its intuitive interface. For my initial print, I created a hexagon shape with 6 rectangular cutouts on each site. For the thickness of the structure as well as the width of the cutouts I choose 0.5 mm. For the length of the cutouts, I choose a quarter of the diagonal axis of the hexagon. The plan is to attach 6 other pieces to one. Additionally, I rounded the edges by 0.5 mm.
Filament setting for the initial print
Printing bed temperature: 0°
Nozzle temperature: 180°
I printed three pieces of the structure. The print turned out fine. Maybe the thickness of the structure could have been slightly increased since the pieces were quite bendable.
Connecting the pieces using the slits worked very well and kept the pieces together.