Week 5: Full Picture

I started this week by using the vinyl cutter to cut a sheet of 6 squares, with four squares in the middle cut out. I had a vague idea of a potential project, but I hadn’t quite figured it out. I figured I’d just dive in.

At the end of my shift, I set about on AutoCAD to quickly make a cube with four raised squares on all faces except what I was going to make the top and the bottom. I hastily put it together and fired up the printer.

I’m from America. I don’t know metrics very well. So I figured the vinyl squares were probably about 3 mm in length. I set up the printer to print a 3mm cube. Tinkerine (the program I use to convert my AutoCAD file to be 3D printed) said that it would take 10 minutes to print, which should have tipped me off. However, I figured I’d send it through anyway and use this print to guage what the proper size was. The result of that decisoion was a very cute cube about the size of a house in Monopoly, and essentially useless.

I hopped onto Tinkerine again, this time making the cube 30mm, which was slated to take a bit more than an hour to print: that sounded more like it. I put the file into the printer, and set it printing while I was on my way out for the day.

The next day, I came to find a beautiful 30mm cube waiting for me in the middle of the printing surface- it was all going accord to plan (a plan that I was scraping together in the moment).

With the cube printed, I placed on the vinyl stickers. The cube looked very cute. I then decided to take it out for some test prints.

The cube was very small and not very ergonomic, but it did, in essence, “work”. I rolled 3 different colors at first onto each side and printed it by slowly rolling the cube over across the paper, pressing on each side when it was flat. This was very uncomfortable, as there was a side that was inked directly above the flat side, so I couldn’t directly press down. This meant I had to push on the edges; not a simple feat.

I’ve come to really like the grain of the 3D printed blocks. It’s a bit streaky in grain, slightly similar to wood grain, but not quite. I was thinking it’d be very cute to make a little zine just of my 3D printed cube rolling on paper. I *really* wanted to roll the cube down a slanted surface with paper a top it. The cube, rolling down the paper, would kinetically print each side as it changed. I think I’d need to put ball bearings in the center of the cube if I were to do that, becuase there’s no way that the plastic could ever be heavy enough to make a noticeable mark or roll down the sloped surface on it’s own.

I also want to make the cube bigger in future iterations. I’ll hopefully 3D print another, larger cube tomorrow.