January 4, 2019
Description
The nice finished photo above is for the Steel version. I need to do a photo shoot now that Iron is finished as well. There is a quick shot of it in the workshop.
I wanted some bookends for my bookshelf, but didn't fancy the idea of spending $20 on some random pieces of rock or whatever. So, naturally, I spent around $80 experimenting and making my own. ;)
The symbol is from Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy. In that series, people can draw magic from various metals, and this symbol is the symbol for Steel. I plan to make additional ones of other symbols, starting with Iron, as Steel and Iron are the symbols on the covers of the special editions of these books, which I plan to order soon.
Brandon Sanderson graciously has SVG files for the symbols available on a wiki. I originally wanted to just print the symbol in 3D, but wasn't quite happy with that. It wasn't 3D enough. So, I traced each part manually in Photoshop and vectorized the various parts. I then imported those vector files into a CAD program and gave the curves and various heights to the different pieces.
The symbol is suspended using 1.5mm carbon fiber rods cut to 41mm in length. The rods are held in place with clear 2 part epoxy. The base is hollow, to be filled with sand, and then plugged using the printed plug that is part of the STL files. I used vinyl rubber self-adhesive anti-slip thingies on the bottom as "feet".
These are printed out of Priline wood fill filament, using the wood.py script, ranging from 210 to 240 degrees. I printed them at .2mm layer height with 25% infill and no support or raft. Two shells is best. One shell works with a .8mm nozzle.
I spent like 45 minutes writing up a super solid "post-printing" workflow using Thingiverse, and after saving, all of the images were gone. So I went in to edit it, and all the rest of my steps were also gone. So, I made an imgur album with the steps detailed in the captions of the photos. You can find that album here: https://imgur.com/a/4yixos2
License:
Creative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial
levenimc
