Part III: Printing the designs
Once the designs were finished, we had to print them using the software Ultimaker Cura. In this application, you can import your .stl files. Upon importing a file, you will get a visual representation of the Ultimaker 3D printer. The surface of this visual representation can be seen as the glass plate that is located in the 3D printer itself. Here you can decide yourself where on the glass plate your design will be printed. Since I had four different .stl files (one for the 3D-object and three for the molds), I was worried that I had to perform four different prints. Luckily, Ultimaker Cura allows for multiple files to be imported at the same time, so they will all be printed next to each other. This way, I’d only need to select one file in total to print everything.
Because of the time we had for this assignment, choices had to be made when it comes to the size of the molds and the settings within the application. Below are the settings we used for our print:
When you import the files, they are the size you made them to be within Fusion 360. Pressing “Slice” in Ultimaker Cura allows the application to make an estimate of the time it will take to print the design. With the size the same as in Fusion 360 (8 cm by 8 cm), the printing would take an estimated 16 hours. We did not have enough time for this. So we decided to reduce the size of the molds. This decreased the printing time significantly.
Once you selected the correct settings, you need to export the file to the SD card that is usually inserted into the 3D printer. Take it out and insert it into your own computer to do this. Then insert the SD card back into the printer. From here, select the file from the UI of the 3D printer. The UI is very clear so it shouldn't be a problem to find anything.
Before you can print, you need to make sure the PLA is inserted correctly (polyatic acid is the material that is used to 3D print your objects). Place the roll on the cylinder to the right of the printer. Pull a bit of the PLA towards the small white box behind it. Press and hold the button to insert the PLA at the bottom of this white box. When it's placed correctly, wait for the machine to process the PLA. When it's ready you can press print. The machine will heat up the nozzle before it's ready to go. A bit of excess material comes out first upon starting, carefully remove this.
Unfortunately. our first print failed horribly. The machine had somehow messed everything up. To this day, we still don't know what went wrong. I personally think it could be a case of the machine needing to recalibrate while it was printing our molds. This is just speculation. We tried again and this time everything went well.
We ended up with two very nice molds! We can use these for when we are going to work with bioplastics.
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