So I hadn’t used my 3D printer in forever. It’s been sitting on my desk with the same green filament from the last time I used it for at least a year. Probably more like three, or even more. The last project I did wasn’t lined up quite right, so looks ok, but not great, so I think I was a little discouraged. Plus, it’s just kind of a pain to work with. The interfaces for both the design program and the printer itself are finicky and sometimes confusing.
Then, my daughter came home and said she wanted to print some things for a school project. I was like, well when do you need it? She had a little over a week, so I figured at least I’d have a weekend to spend some time messing with it. I told her she needed to go to https://www.thingiverse.com/ and find the things she wanted to make. I can do some light editing, but I definitely can’t design the kinds of things she wanted from scratch.
So, she found the files she liked, and I read up on working the printer again. Did I mention the difficult interface? It’s like working on a computer in the 80s.
She needed a sock, an ax, a top hat, and a Russian ruble. (The project to create game board tokens for a Crime and Punishment-related game.) I had to scale some of them to get the size she wanted – the ruble in particular was enormous – but that is the kind of editing that I can do. The ax was particularly fun as it came in two pieces, but she liked the idea of being able to make the head gray and the handle brown. Unfortunately, because of the scaling, the pieces no longer fit together correctly, and I think she ended up just gluing them. It’s a school project, after all.
Transferring the files from a computer to the printer was a whole other kind of fun. First of all, it takes a micro SD card, which is about the size of a baby’s thumbnail. It had been so long since I’d used it that I couldn’t find the card I’d used before, and how do you find something that small? My husband volunteered the card that he used in his drone, but it turned out that the printer can’t read cards over 256MB or something, and this one was of course something like 2GB. I was thinking about just buying a new one, but, shockingly, it’s really hard to find such a low capacity cards anymore. Plus, this was the day that I wanted to actually do the printing. Finally, I dug deep thinking of places I may have stored it “for safekeeping,” and found the original card. Phew.
I showed my daughter how to use the printer, but in actuality ended up doing most of the printing myself. In fairness, she’s a senior in high school and does have a lot going on. I think overall they came out pretty well!
Yes, I made two rubles in different sizes. I started with the smaller one, but didn’t like how thin it was, so rescaled it to be larger, and also more than proportionally thicker. That one is probably a bit big for what she wanted, but by that time I was tired of doing it and said she could use whichever one she wanted, but I wasn’t making another one. I also did the ax in two different sizes, but the first one was definitely too big, so I had already tossed that when I took the picture.
In general, it was time-consuming, but it was kind of fun to get the printer back out and create something with it!