Week 12: Little Factory
Since last week, things have been much more relaxed. I tried printing out the G letter block again. They were pretty close, but about a millimetre off each time. I was ready to say it was good enough, if I printed a set like that, they could all function alright. But my boss noted that they weren’t the same height, and that inspired me to really get the measurements right.
I’d already gotten everything measured on the digital caliber, so things should be lining up. I found that Blender (along with most 3D softwares) uses some arbitrary, nebulous unit. So, I found out how to make it so that the unit I use in the software is millimetres. I made another “G” block and printed it. Sure enough, it was perfect. Each letterpress block took about an hour to print, so I knew doing a lot of them would take a long time. I decided to try testing printing a group of letters. I composed a file with the vowels (it was really simple after I’d mastered the “G”, it was just copy and paste). I put it in the printer, but unfortunately when I checked after the night, I was greeted by not 6 new letters, but a mangled mess. There was some sort of jam.
I spaced the letter a bit more apart and tried again. I saw that the filament was cracking a bit when I got it going on the new file, so I stopped it, fed the filament in a bit straighter, and got it printing again. Hopefully if I figure this out, I can print the rest of the alphabet while I’m not even there!
If I wanted to do a truly traditional letterpress block set, I’d print multiple copies of each letter in uppercase and lowercase. This is because many pages and sentences often have the same letters used multiple times (as I’m sure you know) and letterpress printing is not dynamic. One has to set everything beforehand and leave it to the press, so moving letters around for one page isn’t really an option.
However, I feel a set of capital letters is enough to make the point, and explores the process as much as I feel is necessary. I want to make a guide, I think, for anyone that may want to make their own letters or characters. I was thinking about how my plan to make an image guide didn’t really come through (because a lot of the mistakes that I meant to accentuate to demonstrate what they look like were actually kind of difficult to see…) I think this letterpress block guide will be easier to write and honestly, will probably be more helpful.
Something I want to shift my focus to in the next few weeks is to providing guides and to share the knowledge I’ve learned. I want to make the letter press guide, maybe also a guide to Blender, and my boss and I talked about me holding a demo on how to use Blender and our 3D printer. This would be for a lot of the departmental staff that are curious, but also of course for any students interested. I’m really excited about that.
Also, I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this yet, but my application to the Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research Conference got approved!! I’m going to be speaking at the conference about how I’ve merged 3D printing and traditional printmaking. I’m so so so excited. I’m probably going to spend the rest of today making an outline on
