To finish off the year, I was given 3 weeks during the holidays to design on Fusion 360 and 3D print my own product that could not be easily made subtractively. I had a maximum of 2h to print my product, so I had to take note of the size of my product and the settings in Cura. After many hours of thinking, I had a couple of ideas. My initial idea was to print a stationary holder shown in the picture below.
However, the printing time was more than 2h even after some adjustments to the size and cura settings and thus, I had to think of another product to 3D print.
My second idea was to design one of the chess pieces which was something smaller than the stationary holder and was able to be printed in less than 2h. I was a chess player back in primary school, and the rook was my favourite chess piece to help me develop certain moves during the competition, hence this is why I chose to design and 3D print the rook out of all the chess pieces. It is very simple and fast to design the rook. So here is how I design the rook.
3D printing
The main step is to sketch one half of the rook in any size you desire.
After sketching half of the rook, click on “finish sketch”.
Next, instead of wasting time to sketch the other half of the rook, we can use the “Revolve'' function. This basically mirrors whatever we have drawn to the other side of the sketch.
For profile, click on the sketch area as that will be what we want to mirror to complete the other half. For axis, select the long vertical line and click ok.
The result should look something like in the picture below.
And there you go! You may proceed to 3D print your product using an app called Cura. But first, we need to adjust some settings in Cura so that the product is accurately printed. So let me show you my settings.
Cura settings
Firstly, I have to select the correct 3D printer. In my case, my school lab is using “Creality Ender 3”, so be sure to select the correct 3D printer, otherwise, your product will not be printed.
Secondly, I am going to tweak some of the characteristics of the 3D printer to improve the quality of my rook. The only characteristic I change is the infill because I want my rook to be more durable and not break easily when I drop it. I used the default settings for the rest of the characteristics. However, you can change those characteristics to find the fastest printing time or to improve the quality of your product even more.
Final results
Here is how my rook looks after I 3D printed it.
The rook could not be easily made subtractively because it is one whole object and does not need other parts to join or form it together. Furthermore, the material is added layer by layer from the bottom to the top and no material is being removed or being cut out. Hence, this is known as additive manufacturing.
.stl file link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19wmfX2CF5VWu6RXXeZvG1Q3NUWbnqsmd/view?usp=sharing
.f3d file:
Reflection
This 3D printing activity allows me to brush up my skills on Fusion 360 and also teaches me about the characteristics of 3D printing which can help me tweak my design in Fusion 360 to produce an accurate and good quality of my product. After which, I can print my product using a 3D printer. Furthermore, it allows me to see the difference between laser cutting and 3D printing as shown below.
I think this activity is important because it helps me heavily in modeling my product and to produce many drafts to identify any mistakes and make improvements to it before printing out the ideal final product. It is also very useful for future projects and for the capstone project during my final year. What made this activity interesting is that I am able to print out what I have made to see how accurately the details are printed out. This activity is useful for the project in CP5070 because it emphasises on the importance of Fusion 360 so that I will not forget what I have learnt and can brush up on my skills so that I can use it conveniently for the designing of any products. It also allows me to be familiarised with the different types of 3D printers and how to use it so that I know how to operate it in future. I used to think that 3D printing is a lot more useful than laser cutting due to its more abstract features which allow the printing of the objects to be more defined. Now I think that laser cutting can be as useful as 3D printing or even better for manufacturers mainly due to the shorter time of printing and lower maintenance cost of the laser cutting machine. So next I will continue to read up more about 3D printing and brush up on my Fusion 360 skills so that I can better apply these skills and knowledge for future projects.
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