Valentines 2018 Mixed Materials 3D Printing experiments

Mixed Materials 3D Printing experiments

For Valentines 2018 I wanted to try making things with the family. Not just 3D printing, but a combination of 'mixed materials'. In this blog post and video I'll show you what we did for together for Valentines day gifts using a number of different materials and techniques.

It's true that you can get some really interesting 3D printing materials, including wood, rubber, metal and even cork. But the objective of this project was to help get you thinking about using more than just different 3D printing filaments, colours or thermoplastic materials in your projects.

ColorFabb Bronze filament - can look very nice when buffed, but what about using 'real' materials...

The video below goes over some of the experiments our family did over Valentines 2018 - 

Or you can watch it in HD over on YouTube here 

I have wanted to combine fabric materials that my wife often uses into a 3D model for some time. I'm also really interested in doing more work with real wood. Lets see how we got on and what my kids also wanted to experiment with.

The first task was to select a 3D model we could experiment with, after a brief look I decided to design my own heart shaped gift box, with a lid that could be complemented in different types of materials. 

A simple heart box for experimenting - the lid can be decorated in various ways - see below

After printing the prototype in 3D4M C8 and a few more in Polymaker Polysmooth (PVB) materials, I smoothed one in the Polysher to check the fit and finish.

Printing in C8 Material for the prototype - 

Many more printed in Polymaker PolySmooth PVB

Before and after smoothing in the Polysher

The first was smoothed for my oldest daughter, a simple box that she wanted to decorate.

The second was glitter covered. This uses the Polysmooth trick of adding glitter straight after being smoothed in the Polysher. The glitter sticks and produces a smooth sparkling finish that will not rub off when dry.

Next was an experimentation with paper. 

I have used paper before, I custom covered an entire E3D BigBox with paper a few years back, it was a really fun project to do over Christmas whilst assembling the and wooden version of this rather big 3D printer.

For this I made a 3D printed guide for drawing around different types of materials.

This proved to be really useful in getting patterns to be inline across the three separate sections of the heart box.

Using any sort of paper (or other materials), you can draw around and then cut out each part to fit into the 3D printed inlay areas.

The template was made fractionally smaller to allow for drawing and then cutting, so it should fit perfectly.

The next idea from my wife was to try out an embossing machine she uses on fabric.

I designed up a test 'die' with the letters A and S.

They needed to be mirrored before 3D printing, so the end pattern appeared correctly after being embossed onto a material.

We then tested out leather, vinyl, suede, and some faux materials to see what sort of pressure was needed to get a good level of embossing.

The 3D4M C8 material was a little too soft for very fine features, it got a little squished and sharp edges were slightly crushed after a few operations in the 'BigShot' press.

We later discovered that almost any normal PLA (with some impact modifiers) was one of the best materials to use for printing embossing patterns. It's a hard plastic that's stiff enough to work many times, even on very dense materials and fabric's.

This is an area we are still experimenting with, now moving on to 3D printing both positive and negative embossing sides to get even better results - an update on that in a future post.

I'm really pleased how even a simple embossing pattern turned out, this really has a lot of maker potential for interesting projects.

We experimented with many other types of materials, not all shown in their completed forms. 

One was with sand and sea shells - bonded into the lid using clear resin. 

A Polysmooth 'sticky' lid being covered in real bronze powder - allow to dry and tumble finish.

Another had real bronze powder poured over when 'sticky from the polysher'. Another mixed different colour PolySmooth materials - self bonding when smoothed.

To finish off some of the boxes I also did end up using some ColorFabb Bronzefill filament for inlay sections - tumbled and buffed to a shine.

Finally I really wanted to experiment with a real wood veneer. I was lucky enough to have some leaves of walnut burr to try out.

Using the 3D printed pattern it was easy to trace out onto the thin wood. 

I used some 3M blue tape to help keep the delicate burr grain from splitting - a tip here is to use sharp scissors rather than a knife blade. 

If you do decide to cut it out with a blade, consider rounding off the tip. A sharp blade-end can actually rip wood like this, you are better off going very gently around the line a number of times rather than try to cut out the wood in one pass.

You can leave on the masking tape after cutting, or remove if you feel the wood will stay together.

Then it's a matter of bonding the wood inlay into the 3D printed part.

I used white 3M waterproof PVA, just a thin film of glue over both sides.

I also printed out matching blocks to help compress the wooden inlay into the heart box lid.

These were really useful as it made the job of clamping up the part easy. Just let it dry for 24 hours and remove from clamps.

I'm really quite happy with the first result.

I finished the lid with two coats of polyurethane varnish spray, to seal the wood and the bronzefill.

As a proof of concept, this turned out well enough to make me want to experiment more.  I'm no expert in using wood vineere, so if you have any other tips, do leave them in the comments. I'm really keen to do much more with real wood and 3D printing, I think I will be designing more objects like this for future projects.

The modular jewelry tree - 

I also designed a secret side-project for my wife as a gift. Along with the heart gift boxes, the modular jewelry tree project files are now up on Thingiverse and Youmagine if you wish to use the model for yourself.

My secret project was inspired by something that my wife had mentioned at Christmas. The comment was that her small jewelry stand for necklaces was not big enough and didn't have enough hangers.

Designing this, printing and then polishing and finishing was quite tricky to keep secret, but I managed to get it all done before Valentines day.

This colour of PolySmooth filament produces a really nice 'glazed ceramic' look when smoothed.

It's also a modular design, so you can select different sections in whatever order you require to get the height and length of arms for your jewelry.

The little holes in the stacking pin are for added strength, the force extra material using perimeters so you get a strong connection even with a low level of model infill (15%) - that said for the best end results you should still glue/bond the sections together.

You don't need to glue the arms, they should slide and clip in, holding in the main pillar.

The sections have a slight twist, the purpose is to allow earrings or bangles to hang down, and not overlap any hanging below.

The files are up on Thingiverse and Youmagine - 

Heart Box -
Youmagine 
Thingiverse 

Modular Jewelry Tree - 

Will be uploaded shortly

Proto-Pasta Surprise - 

I had a very nice surprise filament giftbox from the masters of materials at Proto-Pasta.

If you watch the video, I'm genuinely stunned with the multi-colour transition roll of filament. I had hoped to be able to get hold of a roll at some point. 

I now know this was the experimental reel made just before Joel (the 3D Printing nerd) visited the Proto-Pasta team for some custom experimentation of transition filaments.

You can see Joel's recent visit video to Proto-Pasta, on his channel here

Thanks for reading, see you next time.

Rich.

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Files and designs shared on YouMagine

Files and designs shared on Thingiverse

Files and designs shared on GitHub

Files and designs shared on Repables 

My Youtube channel is here, all 3D Printing and Hi-Def video content.

A splash of British colour - Faberdashery PLA experiments

I have been using Faberdashery PLA for the last week and I’m really impressed with it, here are a few things it inspired me to design and print along with some testing results and observations using the filament with my Prusa Mendel printers.

Faberdashery are UK based and their wide range of coloured PLA is manufactured in the UK. They sell by the meter instead of by weight so you can choose as much or as little as you need.

A great way to experience the range is with a Rainbow fun pack

In the Rainbow pack you get 10 beautiful colours, they also have Gold, Silver, and Black, White and others by the meter or 100 m coils. 

No natural/clear PLA is available yet, but maybe they will stock it in the future.

The first great thing about the filament is the great range of Opaque colours, usually PLA is transparent with just a suggestion of colour. I do like the nice solid colours from Faberdashery, they look more like ABS but without the nasty smell or the warp.

The way it’s delivered and packed is great and it feels like you are getting some care and individual attention for your order. The only thing I would like to see in the future is the filament bags heat-sealed maybe with some desiccant for moisture absorbsion, but I expect most of us will use is straight away as soon as we get it.

I finished almost the whole box in 4 evenings flat!

Dimensions of the filament are very good, round and the minimum I measured was 2.74mm and the maximum 2.89mm. All my models were sliced for 2.85mm Filament and I did not need to re-slice for change in colour so having this tolerance is very good when you are doing multicolour filament joining.

The Filament Polymer type is 4043D, recommended temperature of 160Deg C to 220 Deg C, I found the higher end was required for faster printing.

With all these great colours I decided on a Rainbow and after not finding one on Thingiverse I made my own in Sketchup.

It was not just designed to look pretty as I added lots of sections for filament bridging and thin layers for colour change. Skeinforge finds bridging on curves hard as it decided on an angle for the direction of bridge and does the whole section the same angle, so at points along the curve filament is going straight into the gap, this makes it a hard test especially when done at high speed, that’s why you can see a few gaps and dips in the model surface. I could make it look much better with a different Rainbow design but this was testing how the filament would perform on my Prusa Mendel ‘Bling’ machine.

These are the sections of coloured filament you need for the rainbow, it's about 3.5M it total - and Note the correct length of cream filament above, more on that below as I made a mistake in the joining process...

The red length is longer than it needs to be for 'overrun'

I did mess up with the filament joining, as you can see from the printed Rainbow picture above the Red covers 3 bows and mixes Orange, this was simply an incorrect length of Cream filament right after the First White colour, I had cut the correct length of cream as you can see in the photo above, but I joined a off-cut of 12cm rather than the correct length of 37cm :(

The cream should have been where the Pink is and so on, this would have also made light blue in the correct place etc. when I get more filament I’ll try again with the correct lengths and I’ll have a better Rainbow.

Underside of the rainbow, - Note the filament bridging test.

On the back you can see the Cream, it’s in the infill section of the Pink Bridging colour, if it would have been the correct length it would also have been on top.

The rainbow and all the objects here were printed at 120mm/sec Feed/Flow and 200mm/sec Travel speed, 0.5mm Nozzle and 0.3mm layer with 1.5 WOT, no slowing down even on the bridging, just full speed apart from the first layer down and perimeter were done at 60mm/sec.

Take a look at the below videos of the Rainbow print, you can see how the filament is extruding for yourself.

Rainbow files on Thingiveres Here - 

With the multicoloured Heart box I tried a different method to combine colours, along with the joined coloured  filaments I also designed cut-out sections and objects to fit into the voids, after printing these separately these were heated with a hot-air gun and pushed into the spaces, this was not as easy as I had expected due to the fact I made them sized to fit, really they need to be slightly smaller as they would be so much easier to join when warm and soft. 

I’ll try this method again, but similar results could be achieved just with filament joining.

 This round of colour printing also convinced me that you need at least 2 layers to make a good colour change as you can see in the above Purple top-colour and the 'A' below.

Next time I'll make the colour change 2 layers, this would make it nice and solid.

Youtube Video of the printing.

Heart Box files on thingiverse Here - 

I have wanted to print a old fashioned working fan, again I didn’t find one of thingiverse, so I designed a simple one that you can print out in whatever colours you like and fit the sections together.

Simple Sketchup design, each blade is the same. 

The hinge pin is a section of 3mm filament, just melted at each end to hold it in place. The sliding tabs are also fitted in place with melted tops to hold it all together.

Fan design files on Thingiverse here - 

Temperature testing -

This is a good video to show the speed and how smooth the filament is going down - first layer is at 60mm/sec

Using the different colours I discovered that a good temperature for extrusion and a Glossy print is 205 Degrees C and if you want a Matt effect (especially on the Dark Blue and Purple) raising the temperature above 215 Degrees C (See the close-up of the Faberdashery F logo below for an example).

Matt effects can be achieved running the filament at 215 - 220 Degrees C.

Simple two colour print test

My next machine - A very British Mendel - 

3 Colour Red, White and Blue printing.

It's always nice to see community suppliers manufacture in their home country so I could not think of a better way to say 'MADE IN THE UK' than a very British Red, White and Blue Mendel. 

I'll order some more filament and my 3rd Prusa Machine will be made in this Fabtastic 3 colour scheme.

Thanks Faberdashery, keep up the good work and give us all even more great colours to play with.

I will be doing a 'Big PLA Review' shortly, with print comparison and destruction testing from as many suppliers as I can order product from. It should be a good reference point for anyone looking to buy PLA for 3D printing. Stay tuned for updates on this, I hope to include, UK, Europe, US/Canada and Chinese suppliers.

Thanks for looking and please leave a comment.

Rich.