Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01854

I have not had great luck printing swords on the 3D printer. Andy wanted the sword from Percy Jackson and I did print one out and assembled it. However, it was too frail and after I glued it together, sprayed it and then started sanding it the thing fell apart. There was far too little material in the build so it had a ton of cracks all the way up and down the thing. I glued it so many different ways and yet it still was a problem.

So I found another print and I decided to try that. This one had little pins to help hold the parts of the sword together. Things were going well until one of the little pins fell over. When that happened the printer would continue to try and print the next layer of that pin but had nowhere to put the filament so the filament ended up everywhere and was starting to cause trouble to other parts of the build. I reached in to swipe out the excess filament a couple times and one time I was not quick enough and the printer head hit my finger and jammed it a bit. My finger is fine I pulled it back quickly. But, because of that the print was now off by a few millimeters and that threw the whole thing out of whack. Three hours of printing wasted. So, I stopped the printer, cleared the hotbed and removed the little pins as part of the build and started again. We’ll see if this thing prints correctly sometime tomorrow night. It is a 27 hour build.

Of course the first thing I told the kids was not to put their hands inside the printer when it is printing.