The Part

The assignment for this week was to design something that can be made only by adding material. So I made this part that has a screw inside it. I shouldhave used my personal material for the print, the internal structure would have been more visible, but adding some epoxy on the surface helped to see the structure inside it.

First I made the internal screw, and I did leave two layer's worth of room between the part and the holes, it wasnt enough. One of the problems the Leapfrog Creatr we have at the lab has, is that it has no fan that is blowing on the part itself, so bridging is hard to do neatly.

The final printed part is stuck, and the screw wont rotate, so I will wait until the 4th printer is back online, and I can take a model out with the support material in use as well. this should allow the piece to come out as a functional one.

Then it was just matter of lifting up the shell, to cover the whole piece. This cant be substractively produced, because it is impossible to cut the inner spiral while the part is whole. Even a machine with 6 axis of freedom simply cant maneuver in such tight space, so the part can only be made by additive manufacturing, building the spiral as the part is built.

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To design the most complicated part of the piece I used the sweep feature. first I designed the profile of it as a sketch, and then a second sketch to define the path and its length for it. Then with the sweep tool twisted it around a few times to give it the spiral shape it needed. Then it was just matter of adding the shell around it.