Rox's attempts at 3D printing

George is the king of prototyping and he is arguably the father of 3D printing for puzzles. I know some younger people will argue that it is shapeways (2008) and some older people will argue that it is zcorp (2005@) but he has had a HOME printer since 2003.  While 3D printers first came to market in the late 1990's, the price was prohibitive for home users. George's original machine cost over $30,000 and took up an entire closet.  The one I am working on today cost $98 and is smaller than a breadbox. 3D printers have come a long way since they first came to market. It is a difficult task to live with a man like this.  You see, I feel the need to learn how to use the machines.  

On this trip we don’t have the big machines he has at home, and he’s already shown me how to use the sifter on the nylon printer.  I have taken it upon myself to learn how to use the Easy Threed printer we brought along with us.  

George first showed me how to start a print job by plugging in the mini SD card with a file he already had installed on it.  I later asked to be taught how to use the slicer program and spent many hours scouring thingiverse in search of puzzles I could print.  This went well for a while as I was having fun printing many of the business card type puzzles.  But after a while these got boring for me and I moved on to other things.  

Well, over the past few days I have gotten back to printing a number of 2 piece pyramids to give away.  I remembered that I had been given an stl file by my friend Scott Elliot many years ago when I bought my first 3D printer.  He had given me a copy of his puckup puzzle to print.  The deal was I would print a copy for myself and one for Scott.  I dutifully did both and sent one to him.  That Overlord printer which was purchased around 9 years ago now was not worth keeping and I left it behind in the man house.  All it was really good for was clogged nozzles.  Although I did learn a lot about humidity in the filament and how to clean a machine.  

I digress.  I still have a copy of that stl file on my computer so I decided to see what would happen with this printer.  I reduced the size of the print by 20 percent so I could get two puzzles on at once, and I set the infill to 20% as this has been working well for everything else we have printed so far.  

Both puzzles came off the machine just fine, but I discovered that 20% infill is not enough for this one.  The puzzle had quite a few places around the edges where the filament did not bind and you can see through the puzzle.  Solving it is difficult to say the least.  I know the trick of this puzzle, so it’s not that.  The issue is the lack of smoothness.  I need to file down the insides of the puzzle to make it work properly.  Our shipboard workshop is not the most high tech.  

After attempting this one, I tried to make a puzzle called Almost Impossible Heart. This was a disaster.  George spent a great deal of time sanding the pieces but even then, he could only get 3 of the 4 to slide together.  It turns out the designer of the puzzle forgot to build tolerances into the design.  Another bust of a puzzle.  

I’ve "mastered" CAM, now I need to learn CAD.  I’d love to ask George to teach me how to do it but I’m afraid if I do I will stop him from working on the programming he is now doing.  That is much more important to me than my learning how to actually make puzzles.  Perhaps we can do that on our next world cruise.  

We’ve three more sea days before we hit Los Angeles again.  George is working hard on editing the photos that have been taken and creating thumbnails of them.  I spend my time blogging, playing silly games, and puzzling.  Our Around the World cruise has changed to an Epic around the Caribbean and Western World cruise which means I will be returning to Boca for one day to return our scuba gear and hot weather clothes in exchange for some more practical clothing for the colder climates we are headed to.  When I’m at home I’ll also pick up a hard drive of all of the photos Morgan has taken so far and bring it back to the ship to work on from here.  

And yes Scott, I’ve got a copy of the puzzle for you.  It may take me a while to get it to you given the circumstances we are in, but you will get one from me eventually.