Organization XIII Cloak Hardware

Oh dear, it’s been about a month and I did this /weeks/ ago…

Out of self defense, I dove into the Kingdom Hearts fandom just so I could understand what my lunch-table-mates were talking about. Most of the time, it’s better /not/ knowing what they’re talking about, but when they started referring to me as Xaldin, it was Good To Know who that was. He was picked for me because of my hair.

I was amused, borrowed Ani’s cloak (sans hardware) for some basic cosplay shenanigans about the house. Obviously, I had to fix the lack of hardware…

A list of the strange antics I went through for this:

• THREE DIMENSIONAL MODEL TIEMZ
• print (in noxious yellow plastic)
• paint, paint, paint
• wire, string, ribbon, chain, annoying necklace clasps
• actually attach it to the cloak.

Janus

I’ve got two faces now!

Not yesterday, but the Saturday before, I went to the 3rd Ward for their Maker-a-thon, hosted(?) by MakerBot. I spent most of the day there (and the rest on the train *eyeroll*) getting in the way, getting photographed (apparently I’m photogenic? Or maybe it’s just my hair.), and sitting on a table talking about printed things. It was awesome.

The far corner of the room had a middle sized geodesic dome set up in it, with a 3D scanning apparatus set up inside. The scanner involves a Kinect, a laptop and a clot of clever about which I know nothing. They guy running the scanning was kind enough to scan me, and then upload me to Thingiverse so I can be printed.

And lo! I am printed:

We don’t look very much alike, but that’s made up for with the extreme coolness of this.

It can’t be seen in this picture, but the printer exploded my nose badly. As that was one of the last things to print, I saved the print with a little deft knife-work (and ruined any resemblance of our noses). Dad says he’s found the bug in the code that causes that error and has reported it.

My current projects are proliferating, but I’m working on learning OpenSCAD by modeling a zipper to print. The replicat is on hold, as are the goggles that I’ll use the scan of my face to get a custom fit on.

Surface Finish

The Thing-O-Matic produces a fairly rough surface finish. If tactile is what you’re going for, it’s great, but if smooth and shiny is the objective, it’s not so great. I’ve dealt with this before in this post, but a few new ideas came up.

Dad gave me a bucket full of old white prints and let me borrow the jug of dissolved plastic. I contributed the orange paint.

My procedure of the day:

• coat the thing in plastic goo using a popsicle stick
• wait for it to dry
• paint
• wait for it to dry
• coat with plastic goo
• wait some more

The ring used the procedure outlined above. After letting it set, I prodded it with my fingernails and the outer layer of plastic peeled off. It took a bit of persuading so it might work for jewelry but any other higher stress application likely won’t work well at all.

Here I did not put down the first layer of plastic and just painted it. Then I put plastic down on only half of it. After letting it cure, I prodded it with my fingernail and the outer layer of plastic came off just like on the ring and the paint scraped off.

Printing Brass and Painting Plastics

Dad printed me another huge cube as a test run for his new set of calibrations. It printed perfectly, except for what we think is a thermal shock through the middle of it.

The shock can be seen in the right middle flange as a small crack.

Dad printed a bunch of knots to test the overhang capabilities. They’re about the size of the end of my thumb. I decided to clean one up and turn it into a necklace or something.

The back one really is smaller! These have been cleaned up a little with a knife.

ABS plastic (what we print in) dissolves in acetone or methyl ethyl ketone (MEK).  This is after dipping it in MEK for slightly longer than not at all (too long!), panicking, dipping it in ‘Barbie Goo’ (the ABS/MEK solution used to prep print beds), attempting to blow out the film that filled up all the gaps (and generally failing), and then dipping it in clear MEK.

Holding it is tricky- if you have any contact with it, that spot with look different than the rest because it didn’t come in contact with the MEK. So I hung it by a hair. The dip into the Barbie Goo bonded the strands of hair together with plastic. You can see it in the picture because the ‘threads’ are pink, instead of more or less invisible.

The difference is alarming. The one on the left has been cleaned up with a knife, the one on the right has been abused with MEK.

I tried painting it to look like wire. It didn’t work as well as I hoped- it looks like metallic paint on plastic. The paint did not stick or cover well because the plastic is so smooth. I will sand the next one (after making it Perfectly Smooth with the MEK.)

Replicat.1

I’m working on a logo for ReplicatorG because because they are sadly without a logo and because I need to get my hand in with 3D printing. I styled my replicat after the github octocat.

This is the ‘heightmap’ for the cat. Black is low and white is high. I created this from a pen and ink sketch scanned with the lineart option in xsane, which is the best thing ever for scanning black and white things. I’d like to say that I just imported this into blender and had it work. *flail*

What I did:

• create a cube (or use the standard cube) and scale it (S, X/Y/Z) into a roughly square plate, 6 blender units on a side
• select the top face
• apply This Tutorial to it.
• export as .stl
• import into SCAD and scale to be Big, because blender outputs are small, apparently
• print!

The tutorial is really good. However, it should be noted that the ‘Use texture as heightmap’ bit occurs under F5, instead of F6 as implied by the instructions. I also had to scale the texture to fit the top face of the cube (instead of having one small cat or many many small cats). Mind blowing amount of detail here, but what I had to do was adjust the Map Input (F5, Map Input) thing. If you need the texture bigger, make the size:number next to the XYZ grid smaller in all the dimensions that you want it bigger.

Screenshot! with no useful stuff in the button bar at all!

And the finished product!

ISN’T IT ADORABLE