I bought a 3D printer because I wanted to have fun printing just about anything I could imagine. I realized that I basically was using this expensive and complicated machine to print out stuff to stick on my desk at work. It was cool, but not very practical. When I started printing stuff for NWA Space for our outreach events, such as the Amazing Flying Sea Turtle, I was getting closer to the goal of using the printer to its full potential.

See, having a printer is only a small part of 3D printing something. You need filament, the ink equivalent of the 3D world, you can buy filament at all kinds of online retailers. But the most important part of printing something in 3D is the model. Without a model, there is no way you can tell you printer what to print. You have to pass your model to the printer in a specific way for the printer can do anything at all. You can’t just speak to your printer, and ask it nicely to print you something.

I’m a very practical person. I love to solve problems, and I have a hard time finding motivation for anything that isn’t tied to a problem. Enter my longtime friend, Paula. She has a couch that has cup holders, and recently one of the plastic cup holders that fit into her couch broke. She asked me if I could print her a replacement one.

Since I started using my 3D printer, I had to use the models of other, and in this instance there was no existing models. I would need to learn how to make my own model from nothing. So, I started learning a free 3D modeling tool: Blender. It’s like Photoshop, but for 3D models instead of images. I had to carefully measure the broken cup holder, and make the basic shape of it in Blender. It consisted of one basic shape used three times: a cylinder. It is a tall cylinder for the body, a short and fat cylinder for the lip, and a third cylinder as the void that makes the actual part that holds a cup.

Yes I know it looks like a Mario pipe. So I have the basic shape down, but it looks a little block-y, instead of round. I had to learn to smooth out the edges, as well as beveling the lip to make the model more like the broken source material. That took me a few weeks of working here and there, but I finally figured it out. I just now had to get the raw model converted to directions that my 3D printer can understand. So I bring it into what is called a slicer. It takes a model and slices it into thousands of layers and gives the 3D printer directions on how to move its X, Y, and Z-axis motors. Well I ran into a huge snag. This is what I saw when I imported the raw blender model into the slicer.

No it’s not empty, the model is just really small. Here. Let me zoom in for you.

As you can see, my scaling is off. Even though I created the model in Blender as an exact 1:1 for the intended size, I learned that certain file type don’t care about scaling. I had to trick Blender into exporting the model as 1000 times larger than it wanted to. Once I did that, I ended up with the following.

Below you can see the completed model, and finally the model next to the broken cup holder, and finally the printed cup holder where it belongs. I had a lot of fun learning this new tool to completely make my own original model from nothing. This opens up a whole new world for me. Who knows what I’ll be able to make next. I’ll see you again next month with whatever else I find interesting!