Since I first started Dad Man Trading I have attempted to emphasis how this is simply a hobby, where I then offer some of the things I print for sale with all profits reinvested back towards initiatives in and around my local community.
Throughout life I have always TRIED to make the community around me a better place, unfortunately since my injury which left me disabled I originally struggled to find a way to continue to try and make that difference – that is when I stumbled across 3D Printing.
Today, in an effort to show you more about my hobby, I wanted to take you on a little journey through the printing process by printing one of our fantastic NEW products – the Chocolate Birthday Cake Dragon.
Chocolate Birthday Cake Dragon
Cinderwing3D is known around the world in 3D Printing circles with her articulated dragon designs. They are the ones primarily seen around here at Dad Man Trading, albeit with a couple additional dragons from other designers, that we pay the designer a licensing fee to be able to commercially produce her designs.
Earlier this month Cinderwing3D celebrated her fourth-year in operation with the release of this design, considering that Dad Man Trading has just entered our 2nd full year as a 3D Printing business, it seemed the timing was right for an ‘All Round Celebration’.
Our first step upon opening the file is to set it up on the printing plate. When it comes to multi-coloured printing the more you can print on a ‘plate’ the better; it saves both time and money – so in the picture above we see that we have placed three Chocolate Birthday Cake Dragons to be printed.
The program above doesn’t reflect what the outcome is; as the program only allows you to select single colours to represent what you are printing – this is so you can easily tell the program what filament (you will see soon) to pick from when printing.
In this screenshot you are able to see our ‘Filament’ details for the Chocolate Birthday Cake Dragon. Here we have a number of sections – this shows how much filament of each colour is going to be used on the Dragon itself, how much is going to be a waste (purged) which is when colours change to ensure there is limited colour bleeding (black to white is the worst) and how much is used on the Prime Tower (the square in the earlier screenshot) – this is just to clean the printing nozzle and get any last little nasty bits of the previous colour out before it continues it’s printing journey.
You may remember I said just above that you try to fit more on the plate when printing in multi-colour? That it is quicker and cheaper? This is what I mean as while printing just ONE on the plate would use less filament on the model – it still has to make all those colour changes (explained in a second) and will still use the same amount of filament in purging and the tower.
The information just shared with you is for THREE dragons we are printing. Whereas if I was to print one it would still (for example) waste 30.19g of the pink plus the 6.37g on the Prime Tower – better to waste it just once than three times right (which would turn it to 90g/ 18g approx respectively).
One of the final little bits of information you see in that screenshot is the Filament Change Times: 337.
That means 337 the Filament changes colour throughout the printing process. If you do not have the Automatic Material System (AMS) as you are about to see in an upcoming screenshot that would mean 337 times you would have to ‘Pause’ your print, go over and take that colour out, put the new colour in, and restart the print – plus it’s not that easy you have to wait for the printing needle to heat and release/load your filament in total each filament change takes approximately 60 seconds to 90 seconds either manually or with the machine.
One of the most important parts with my printing is timing. I am one that hates wasting time; so I try to work out my printing schedule where the printers more times than not are doing what I brought them for – printing.
As you can see from this screenshot it is going to take just over seven-minutes for the printer to do is auto-align, load it’s first filament and get ready to print out our three dragons over the next…. One Day, One Hour and 26 minutes.
Two things. One I am disabled, it would be too painful and just insane to consider getting up 337 times to change the colour, sometimes just seconds after previously doing it, for the new colour to be loaded. Two – I didn’t invest in all these fancy doo-hickies and additions aimed at making life easier to look at them and think how pretty they are… let’s put the Automatic Material System (AMS) to good use with our print.
Earlier I did say forget the colours in the system on the screen it is just aimed to tell the AMS what colours to use? This is exactly what I mean.
We had pink in the system earlier, yet the moment I saw this Dragon I knew I wanted a rainbow type of colour to have a fun, frosted icing type of look – and that is what you see above. The four colours we have opted to go for with this Dragon is the Brown to represent Chocolate Cake, a fast changing rainbow filament to give it that cool icing look I was after, a bit of a brighter yellow in an attempt to make ‘star’ decorations and off course white for the cupcake bases seen throughout.
Now that we have received our file, sliced it on the plate, got the AMS ready with the colours we are after it is time to press PRINT – let the printer do its 7 minutes and 13 seconds of preparing… oh and it’s DAY of printing.
Now that this has finished printing on the machine – let me introduce you to our brand new Chocolate Birthday Cake Dragon; which will be making its way on the Dad Man Trading website shortly and will also be available (while stocks last) at upcoming Market Appearances.
