3D Printing

Idea

When we were asked to think of something that cannot be made easily using machinery that comes in one piece. Like a ball bearing, joints, hinges. These are some examples.

I heard from a video I have seen on youtube that making chainmail armour during medieval times were very difficult. This is due to the number of rings needed to create a piece of armour. Not forgetting to mention that they were made of metal and needs to be really hot to form the rings. In addition to combining them in a pattern.

Example of Chainmail:

Creating the model

Chainmail in principle is a bunch of rings combine together. Using Fusion360, I started with making a ring.

Start with sketching a circle and placing a point that will be the centre of my ring. Using the revolve tool, it creates the ring with the point being the centre of the ring and the circle forming the body.

Afterwards, rotate the ring so that it is at an angle from the ground and not lying flat. Copy and paste the ring and rotate it in the opposite direction of the original is facing. After a few more copy-paste and tweaking, I got this.

The .f3d and .stl files will be in the google drive below or in the .rar

Google Drive

Files.rar

Download RAR • 1.24MB

A picture of the final product with myself.

Reflection

Making the model was the easy part. Trying to come up with the idea was the difficult portion where there are a lot of things that could work. I decided to go with chainmail due to its simplicity. It can be easily made but is very time consuming due to how small the rings can get and how many there are.

While using Cura to prepare for printing I noticed two things.

1. There were a lot of supporting structures due to the majority of the model being suspended in the air. This contributed to the waste materials and time since the printer need to print the supporting structures with extra materials.

2. The scale of the chainmail I made in Fusion360 was very big and would take too long to print. So I scaled it down to 20% of its original size so that the printing time is within the 1 hour that I was allocated for printing.

During Printing the ring shape was a complex shape since the printer cannot do curves very well and especially by how small it came out.

After Printing, the final shape it took was better than I expected due to the fear that the ring would not print properly due to the significant overhang of the rings. There were imperfections but at the small scale I was printing at, it was not as noticeable unless you look in closer. The number of supporting structures were a lot but I expected it to be a lot more.

The capability of the printer may have affected the printing quality itself and due to it trying to print out rings, but overall it exceeded my expectations. I expected the printing to go wrong. It came out just fine and I am happy with my work.