When my 3D printer isn’t printing…I start feeling a little antsy.
After getting the printer for Christmas from my lovely, generous, and extremely intelligent wife, I spent the first few days/weeks figuring out how to make the thing work. Each day brought several hundred revelations. A 3D printer It’s not like a modern inkjet or laser printer that you take out of the box, perhaps install a driver and it just works. Nope…3D printing is the wild west, baby! It’s a veritable rabbit hole that once you go down it, it’s hard to find the bottom. Heck…I don’t want find the bottom! I’m having too much fun. But I digress…
When the printer isn’t printing, I start feeling antsy. I don’t feel like I’m learning. So, on just such an occasion this week, when my 3D printer was sitting idle. I started to look for something that would challenge me and her.
I found this model of Groot on Thingiverse. The amount of detail that the model provides is fantastic. I could see that it’s would deserve nothing sort of the finest detail my 3D printer could deliver.
“Normal quality” 3D printing is, by most standards, considered to be 200 micron. In other words, each layer is a mir 0.2 mm thick. A millimeter is a very small unit of measure, right? now imagine cutting that millimeter into 5 parts. that is ‘normal’ quality 3D printing. And it looks pretty good!
100 micron is considered “high quality” 3D printing. At 100 micron, the individual layers of 3D printer nearly become indistinguishable. A human hair is about 100 microns thick.
So I wanted to push the limits of my 3D printer. I set her to print at 50 microns; Each layer is half the width of human hair, 20 layers per millimeter! I wasn’t sure how Groot would turn out. But I sure wasn’t disappointed.
And how long did this print take? Well, lets just say I didn’t feel antsy for 22 hours.
Join me another day when I embark on painting Groot. Until then…
Make. Life. Ultra Fine.
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