3D Printing - Beeeeees - The Difficulty of Design
3D printing is new, shiny and a wonderful opportunity to make amazing things. From the outside, it looks easy but it can be really difficult to get the good quality information on it. That is where I struggled starting out. Here I’ll share the things I’ve learned on my own journey so that you might get to skip the first few mistakes I’ve made. We wanted bees. Fast. I wanted big fluffy ones but that’s beside the point. These beautiful little creatures are quite complex if you want an accurate representation of them. I dove right in to try to 3D print them. Reading the specs on various printers I naively assumed that if a printer could print a 100 micron layer then I could design to that size. This was not my cleverest moment. There isn’t much structural integrity in a strand of skinny melted plastic. My very first design never even got to print as the tail and antenna were too thin. So I started with a head, wings and body on a little stand. He was tiny. 3D