additive aspirations
printornaut is woodrow wiest
Conceptualize
An idea must be nurtured into a design. We can look towards what inspires us to create interesting and useful things. 3d printing, or additive manufacturing, has tremendous use and vast potential. I attempt to design with intention, experiment, understand, and envision humanity while being inspired by nature, especially the sea. Focus propels me towards intelligent goals and failure keeps me humble. Knowledge and altruism are my long term goals.
CADesign
The topology optimization produces a result that can be 3d printed but we have some adjustments to make. Furthermore, we also need to consider printability of the part via FFF. Here we can practice sculpting with the t-spline form function built into Fusion 360. The result is an editable CAD model which we can save as an STL for printing. Read the full paper here.
Additive Manufacturing
FFF printers have some limitation to their accuracy. This limitation is typically accounted for by designing in some offset or clearance to the parts. If the parts are to fit for example, a hole inner diameter to a shaft outer diameter, 0.2 mm between the parts is often sufficient in my experience on the Creality Ender 3 FDM printer. The Ultimaker 2+ has proven to be slightly less accurate and a clearance of 0.5 mm is required. Read the full paper here.