Stacking 3D Prints & Scratching Faces

[Music] cool hey friends welcome to make anything it's Devin here and as you can see I've been printing some face shields in case you're out of the loop the 3d printing community has stepped up big time to print these face shields for frontline workers battling kovat 19 so hospitals have been having supply shortages and basically as soon as they saw the opportunity a lot of big players in the 3d printing space stood up to the plate and started making all of these face shields to donate to all those hospitals and all those frontline workers in need and I think that's awesome this version here was designed by a 3d Vic's ton in Sweden and you may have seen them on 3d printing nerds recent video where he printed some of these and had a nurse friend test them out and approve of them so I started printing them myself I really like this design because it doesn't require any elastic to stay on my head it's just the tension of the 3d print and it was designed to use standard a for transparency sheets which is really cool although I didn't have any when I was making this one so that's why I have this yellow film gel that's all I had around although I don't know maybe I'm onto something it's a bit fashionable you know just because we're in a global pandemic doesn't mean we can't look good or maybe it's a way of communicating your mood to people while respecting socially acceptable boundaries like oh I'm so angry 2020 was supposed to be my year 2020 was supposed to be why [Music] anyways I think these face shields are fantastic whether you print the Prusa version or this 3d verax dawn version or another approved version I would suggest checking out madder hackers calm slash Co vyd - 19 they're working to connect hospitals and volunteers in an orderly fashion so definitely go check them out if you're interested in helping out so I am printing out a ton of face shield and I'm excited to donate those to the hospitals but I'm a designer so I wanted to help out using my design skills you know scratch that design itch and then I had a real ditch and it hit me yes I call this the scripture and it's a print in place face scratcher a little tiny hand with a switch here at the bottom that lets you get that little scratching action so you can reach under your mask engage the scripture it's good your way mmm oh yeah I'll be printing my scriptures on the artillery Sidewinder x1 3d printer which has definitely become one of my go-to 3d printers lately and I'll go ahead and load up some of this tan PLA filament paella mentum as it matches my pasty complexion quite well so we're off to the races and you can start to see the beginnings of the scripture and the real cool thing about this design is that it's entirely print in place so all the little hinges and mechanisms that make this thing work are all printed in one go and once it's cooled down it's ready to go right off of the build plate how cool is that here's that newborn scripture in action and as you can see the way it works is it's got this slider at the handle which creates tension on this thin piece of plastic on the back that pushes the fingers forward with this nice spring-like action and it's pretty amazing how well it works even with this PLA plastic which is usually quite brittle but this just goes to show that with the right design you can make materials do some pretty impressive things ah yes very impressive once again face scratches I within reach and we finally have a use for those little pockets on our jeans that said let's continue to practice good hygiene [Music] Skechers that's my contribution you might recall a couple months ago I made a video where I showed you how to use custom cheat code to automatically eject prints so that you can almost fully automate your 3d printer well this week I saw that technique put to great use by Instagram user just 3d printed whoo as you can see here is ejecting face shields using that same technique you can see that little 3d printed attachment on the head of the printer to help knock off these very shallow prints and it also looks like he had the g-code waiting after the print finished to let the bed cool down a bit so the prints come off more easily anyways that post pretty much inspired me to make this video so that I can share yet another way to efficiently print face masks and that is by stacking prints vertically yes that's right we are working with a 3d printer after also besides arranging parts on the bed you may be able to actually stack prints on top of each other depending on the print and in this case with this face shield it's the perfect model for this technique so let me show you how we can actually stack face shields and print several all in one go so we're gonna go ahead and do our stacking in Microsoft's 3d builder which is a nice free Windows program will drag in that STL file that we downloaded from the 3d vex town website let's accept that and if we click on the model here and go to this scaling tool right here we can actually get the dimensions of our model and we're most interested in the Z dimension which as you can see here is a nice clean 5 millimeter height that's gonna make our job a bit easier let's switch to the move tool here and you'll notice that the Z value has changed to 2.5 and that's because Microsoft Builder places the origin in the middle of the part so 2.5 is half of 5 so we need to figure out how to change this hi in order to create the perfect gap between parts and to do that I'll first copy this part with a ctrl C and if I just hit ctrl V now you'll see that Microsoft builder places the model way over here on the left because it doesn't want to overlap the models so what we want to do is first move this part out of the way and then we can paste a second shield underneath so based on how this works if we change this Z value to 7.5 that would create this stack of 2 prints with no gap in between the parts and if we do that well we're not gonna have any gap when we're slicing the prints and those parts would just merge together and become one solid block that's definitely not our goal for this technique we actually want an air gap between our prints and since we're printing at a point one nine millimeter layer height I want to choose a larger gap than that so we're gonna go with 0.3 millimeters and to do this I'll bust out my calculator app and do this basic formula which is to take this z position multiply that by 3 which gives us the value for a perfect stack but then we'll add in 0.3 to add that point 3 millimeter gap into this equation so we'll hit equal and that gives us 7 point 8 so now we can go ahead and change this Z position to 7 point 8 well paste another face mask into the original position and now you can see we've got that really small little gap between our two prints and that is in fact a point three millimeter gap so now we've got two stacked and we can basically just repeat this process of doubling the number of face masks so I'll select both of these and group them and that gives us a new Z value here 5.15 so once again I'll plug that into the calculator I'll multiply it by 3 and I'll add that point 3 millimeter gap so now we get 15 point seven five we'll go ahead copy our two masks change this to fifteen point seven five and then paste those two masks back underneath well group it again just keep repeating that process with the new values that it gives us ten point four five multiplied by three and add point three that gives us 30 one point six five I'll repeat that until we have sixteen face masks stacked each with a point three millimeter gap and then I can hit save and export all of these as a single STL file which I can then bring into my slicer so this is Z sweet it's a slicer specifically for mais or Trax printer so you probably won't be using this slicer but the general principles are more or less the same many of the settings that I'd like to change are locked in this slicer but I'm basically just printing the solid at that point one nine millimeter layer height with no support material on which means that those gaps that we designed will be included in our G code if I scroll through the layers here very carefully it seems like there's actually a two layer gap between the parts and that is perfect so let's go ahead and start printing here you can see the beginning of the fifth face filled with the printer bridging over this gap and it looks like it's doing a really nice job of it there's a bit of stringiness here and there but that's pretty common with PE T G as you can see I'm printing with a raft which is something I almost always avoid but it's pretty unavoidable with this m300 printer it's just kind of how it works and also the printers not printing too too fast I'm playing it kind of safe for now I'm just trying to get this machine to print masks on its own without much intervention rather than going for a high speed record here's a cool shot of the first layer of another face shield being printed and you can see how it's kind of loosely printing on top of the last layer because of that air gap that is programmed into the slicer here's what I came back to the next day a nice stack of 16 face shields and here you can see me prying off the first shield from the rest of the stack it came off quite nice so that was promising there we go it's a bit hairy but definitely functional so here we go 16 PE T G face shields all printed in one go and stacked on top of each other with that point three millimetre gap and it looks absolutely perfect so now I'm just gonna take a spatula here and gently wiggle them apart I just got to find a nice corner where I can wedge this in well the first one came off perfectly and the second one this is a total disaster as I continued wedging my spatula between the face masks I found that a lot of them we're ending up like this so hey there future Devin here well not your future but his future and boy is past Devin looking silly right now but don't worry I'll explain everything you see back when Devin was stacking those layers and you thought a point three millimeter gap would be a nice simple number to get the job done it's bigger than the point one nine millimeter layer height so surely there will be a gap between every print but that's not how it works the thing is when that file gets brought into the slicer it has to convert everything into perfect 0.1 nine millimeter layer Heights so when it sees that point three millimeter gap sometimes the bottom layer will round up or down the top layer will around up or down and that means you can end up with anything from a two layer gap to no gap at all it's a total mess that's what happened to this poor sucker but don't worry the solution is pretty simple all we have to do is make the gap an exact multiple of the layer height so in this case we want to have a gap of two layers each layer 0.19 millimeters so we multiply that by two point three eight millimeter layer gap so that's gonna be our new gap between layers will go back into 3d builder rebuild our part with that perfect gap and then when we bring it into the slicer it'll have a nice two layer gap between every print every time that's what I did this time and it works so much better I can actually separate the prints without even having to use a spatula they just pull right apart that's how it's meant to be all right see you guys so you definitely want to make sure you get your settings right and your spacing right when you're stacking prints especially if you're printing with a very brittle filament like PE TG nevertheless once I got my settings dialed in for this particular file I was able to stack masks quite successfully and the quality of the bottom layers looks pretty similar to if I just printed this with a raft so let's go ahead and finish up one of these face masks besides the printed part we also need the transparent face shield and for that I have these transparency films which were donated by the local school district now I just need a standard three hole punch then I'll punch three holes shift the sheet over a specified amount and then punch three more holes there we go we've got six holes now which we can pop right onto these little nubs and they basically just hook on there and hold in place by tension like I said it's a really nice well done design ideally I'd be using a4 size sheets which go around the ears a little bit further however in this emergency situation this will do the job so I'm just gonna go ahead take my scissors and around off these corners to prevent any accidental pokes and we've got ourselves an emergency face shield quite nice I do want to share one more example of stacked prints because most people would say that you can only stack completely flat prints but I actually managed to stack a more complicated print somewhat my ambiguous cylinder this time around I'm gonna show you how I do my stacking directly in simplified 3d so we'll start by bringing in our and big Lluis cylinder we'll copy and paste it and with both these models selected we'll go up here and select align selected model origins which will bring those two models right into the in position now let's select both of these and offset them in the Z direction just to bring it off the build plate a bit and to make it a nice even number there we go now we've got a little gap to build up our supports now I'll select just my second ambiguous cylinder and I'll increase the Z offset until hopefully those two parts look perfectly stacked there we go looks like I designed this with some nice clean numbers as well we'll just increase this by 0.4 to give us a point four millimeter gap between the parts I am printing this at point one two millimeter layer Heights but because this is a curved surface between the parts my little formula of doubling the layer height doesn't work exactly the same way with this print anyways let's paste in a third cylinder once again we'll align it to the model origin and then I'll go ahead and just take that one and offset it in the z direction as well now this time it won't align perfectly because we already have that point four millimeter gap so lower this until it's barely overlapping by 0.4 millimeters and then I'll increase it by 0.8 leaving us with that point four millimeter gap there so we've got our stacked cylinders and I'll actually be printing this using two separate processes because we only want support material on our first ambiguous cylinder like I said we've got a point 1/2 millimeter layer height here and everything else is generally standard the second profile is the same just without that support material turned on and so we'll make sure that that is applied to the other two cylinders this is going to prevent support material from automatically filling in those gaps between the parts now with just the bottom cylinder selected I'll open up our custom support tool I'll make the pillar resolution one millimeter and generate automatic supports so there we go we've got the supports we need underneath our first cylinder so you can see there's those two little empty patches so let's go ahead and change the resolution to four millimeters and just add in two little custom supports right there and now I can select both of these processes to print both of them together and we have our completed g-code file the colors here just indicate the two different processes we used we can change that coloring here but most importantly let's take a look at that gap between the layers once again we'll just slowly scroll through and take a look at those layer gaps and once again it looks like we've got that ideal two layer air gap between the prints so I think that'll work out great well actually I know it'll print out great because this is my third attempt as you can see that print completed with no problems those air gaps didn't cause any catastrophic disasters in fact the cylinders look great they separate surprisingly easily and even more surprising if you look at the quality of the layers I think the bottom surface of the stacked cylinder actually looks better than the regular print so now I could theoretically print a bunch of these tall stacks of ambiguous cylinders then have the printer push all of those prints off the build plate and just be like mass-producing these things although I don't need that many quite yet alright well I hope you learned something from this video I'll put links in the description so you can go ahead and print out some face shields for yourself you can print out some little scriptures just got your face make sure to wash your hands and your little hands if you have any thoughts suggestions and I could probably use some advice from this video is there some kind of formula you have for more effectively stacking prints let me know but that's it for today's video so until then I'm Devin this is making anything and as always stay inspired [Music] you

Channel: Make Anything

Views: 96,114

Rating: 4.8819742 out of 5

Keywords: 3D printed, 3d printing, 3D print, 3d printer, make anything, stacking 3D prints, stack 3D prints, how to stack 3D prints, 3D printed face shields, 3D printing face shields, 3D printed face masks, 3D prints, scritcher, tiny hands, little hands, 3Dverkstan, cool prints, cool 3D prints, covid-19, covid, 19, coronavirus, corona, virus, respirator, 3D printed mask, social distancing, 3d model

Id: MHKBvk8IAc0

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020