Hi Guys.
Very pleased to say Maddison our new granddaughter arrived safe and well on the 9th January. Mother and baby both doing very well.
I have been working on a hanging mobile for the bedroom for a few weeks now. I thought I would share the process.
Because I have very limited drawing ability I started with a clip art image taken from google. It’s not going into production and not being used commercially so I don’t think I have broken any rules.
The next step was to draw the outline I wanted and layout the various connecting sections. The mobile is 3D printed so any tolerances required are built into the drawing at this stage. As simple as this drawing looks there were many enjoyable hours spent revising and revisiting this process.
Then the individual parts of the mobile were produced from the initial layout.
As the process went along I test printed the pieces if changes had to be made to the fit or tolerances etc. I revised the main drawing and remodelled from the original.
The model is two sided. With the same image mirrored on the reverse surface.
Again this started out as a clip art loaded from google. It is probably easier to see the amount of work required to build up the layers on this drawing than on the teddy bear.
The body part is made up from a centre core with additional sections layered onto the surface to create depth once the overall design is ready they are joined into one part for final edge finishing then out put for printing.
The top of the hanging mobile design changed when the guys at Shapr3D released the update to the app and included the projection feature. I have very little use for this feature in the day job which is garden design having survived with circles, squares and triangles for all these years but wanted to give it a go anyway.
Also there was no need for clip art on this section it was a series of circles.
With a cylinder pulled up a second drawing of the arch shape was offset to the side and intersected to form the main header structure.
Several rings would be stacked one on top of another. When printed in different colours they would form a rainbow.
Another cylinder had a cloud shape projected onto it.
The cloud shape was cut out and along with the string clearance holes created from the original drawing were subtracted from the rings.
The original cloud shape was retained and modified ready to be included in the header structure.
Flushed with success from drawing a cloud without the aid of clip art I produced a hot air balloon to finish off the design.
With the main design done the wait to find out if the baby was going to be a boy or a girl was taken up with printing the sections that were not gender specific! So the rainbow was output to the iCloud desktop.
Then imported into the slicing software.
After the software has positioned the necessary supports the model is sliced into layers and then converted to a g code file the 3D printer requires. At the risk of sounding like I know what I am doing if anybody told me that there is a bunch of monkeys inside the machine working out the maths on a abacus I would believe them. As far as I am concerned it just works!
The next stage is the printer. And wait for the baby’s arrival.
The great day arrives. My wife nearly explodes every time her Iwatch pings. Eventually the message comes through “It’s a girl her name is Maddison. Everything is fine come to meet her.”
I load pink filament into the printer and start to print the gender specific parts teddy’s tummy, unicorn’s nose etc. Off we go to the hospital.
Following Rob’s example I create a file of the baby’s name using a Disney typeface (it’s a long story. All I can say there are some very serious big mouse fans in the family).
Draw the outline following Rob’s fine example
And pull up the text letters.
I also used the lowere case ‘m’ from Robs file for the tummy of the teddy bear. Output the text to the printer. Once all the elements were finished I spent a very happy evening assembling the mobile.
