1.- Designing and Printing.

To begin this part of the assignment I had to think of something that was not easily made by using an automatic cutting machine. I like the YouTube channel Numberphile, that channel has several videos on Klein bottles, so I decided it would be a good idea to make one, since I could not see a way to make one without doing it by had or by 3D printing it. To begin with my design I entered SolidWorks and created a new piece. I made a drawing in which I roughly wanted the Klein bottle to be and i made a revolution extrusion with it. I then proceeded to empty the  solid I created and cut the neck part and entrance part of it. I then created two circles, and  the shape of the neck of the bottle as a path, I extruded the wider circle along the path, and then cut with the smaller circle along the same path. It roughly ended being something like this. Note this is a recent screenshot, mainly because I forgot to take them along the whole process.

 

 

 

I proceeded to export this as an STL file, and go with the person in charge of the 3D printers to begin using them, he showed me the program that we were going to use and told me that if I wanted to have it I should install it and go with him to know the parameters for the printers that are available for use. The specific machine I used was the Rostock max v3. This piece had a problem, which was that the bottom part did not really join with the rest because of how i made the extrusions, so when I moved to printing it, it became something like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After I stopped the machine, I went to make the design again, because I did not know at the time what was causing the problem exactly. So i drew the shape again, and did every thing again, but instead of extruding everything all the way, I left it just so it connected and did not erase the connection. Here are the pictures of the new model I used, taken after I finished because I was concentrating on it.

 

After this I saved it as STL again and repeated the steps to the set the printing machine, this time it printed almost all the way without incidents. Almost at the end of the printing the piece got unstuck from the base and the printer knocked it over, we managed to stop it before it made a big mess. Sadly I had to leave early so I did not print it a third time myself and just asked for the person in charge to do it for me, since I had to leave that day. By the time the class in which this is revised the 3D printer must have finished it, but i did not have the time to upload about it.

 

 

2.- Scanning

I decided to scan a ball I found in my  dad's office, for this I had to make an appointment so I could use the scanner without a lot of problems. the scanning Machine I used was a Romer RA 7520 SI. Since I had to set the object down, I had to scan first one half of the object, then the second half of it. I had about 57 scans for one of the sides, and about 10 of the part I was missing.

 

 

 

I then had to join both scans so I could have my object complete, to do this I used tools from the same program I used to scan the object. after this I exported the scan as a text file with the coordinates for each point in the object. This is the text file.

 

 

 

 

 

3.-  Test part.

The day of the class we got together and downloaded a design for a test part, and proceeded to print it. The specific machine I took interest in was a Rostock mx v3. I believe two of us took interest in this machine, so we used it to make the test part. We could see it bended a bit on the hangs and was not terribly accurate, but for my purposes it was fine so I decided to use it for my Klein bottle.