3rd Mendel Set for Sale & More About Moustaches

Willow has recently completed it's third complete set of Mendel parts! This set was printed using mostly Blue Translucent, UV Happy, UltiMachine PLA.  I did run out of that PLA before finishing the extruder and a few of the y bar clamps, so the those are printed in the Natural PLA.

 

They are on eBay currently and close on Nov 18, 2010 at 5:56:54 PST.  I have cleaned them up some but have not reamed the holes.  They come with a certificate of lineage (for anyone tracking that) suitable for framing.  Check out the eBay listing for more information.

I also have a collection of items on etsy that I am selling to help support Movember.  During the month of November I am donating 100% of the sale price of all of these items to the Movember Foundation.  Some of these items were 3D printed on Willow.  If you want to see my slow growing moustache updates or donate money directly to Movember you should visit my MoSpace Page.

Movember Moustaches

I took a small detour from Mendel reproduction to explore printing Moustaches (I am participating in Movember).  I first made a design that works very well for a larger Moustache but started to behave strangely in RepSnapper as I scaled it down.  The slices would start getting too small and the part would have huge steps.

So I tweaked my design and made a second version that worked a little better (more rounded points and slightly better geometry).  RepSnapper still had problems with strange layers with this version.

I ultimately made a third version with simpler geometry.  This version worked very well for small Mo's (2nd-3rd image below) but RepSnapper did something even stranger on the versions with holes for a necklace cord or key chain (top two).

The geometry is just chopped at the hole.

I took the STLs into MeshLab and did some smoothing and face re-simplification and was able to get something that did not have sharp corners and prints well in RepSnapper (even with the holes - see bottom two images above).  It is probably time to start learning how to use something more robust than RepSnapper (like Skienforge...)