The Saturday Killer

26 prints. 25 color changes. 10 Zoffset adjustments. 3 hours. And that's not including designing time (which I'm scared to tally.)

I really, really wanted to see how far I could push multicolor printing, and I think this is it; I'm not sure I can push any farther.

What we have here is a 5 color bottle opener with text on the 4 edges. I went with a play on the classic Simpsons line: "Beer. Cause of. Solution to. Problems" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUVwR0rw5fk )

As you can imagine, the process was pretty tricky. I needed to make and position an object for each color in OpenSCAD. Then, because this was going to be done as a series of prints, I needed to pre-slice those objects into 2 layer pieces (except for the top and bottom - those were 4 layers)

The main challenge I had was getting the text to skein faithfully. Rounded edges caused the text hole to sometimes be a different size than the text that was going there.

So... after 10 hours of trying other fonts... I made my own custom font. sort of. I only made the letters I needed. With layer thickness and path width as variables, I was able to get hole and text to match. But it really only came together once I added a solid bar behind each of the text objects. This caused each layer of the text to be skeined as a nearly-continuous stream, which really improved final quality.

Anyway. I'm tired. Time to go lay down.

More info here: http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2011/10/a-proper-multi-color-print/

UPDATE: I created the rest of the alphabet and put it into a work-in-progress font here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12618