Marco Jonsson Project 3: 3D Printer

 Process:

I wanted to take a slightly different approach to sculpting in Fusion (shocker I know). Since I really hate the imprecise aspects of pushing and pulling, I decided to make something very mathematical instead, with a construction ruleset that I could generate on my own to follow.

 I imagine most of us have heard of a mobius strip, but its harder to build in practice than one might think. For one, we have thickness of material to account for, and a particularly strange geometry to twist around. I wanted to make a "multi-sided mobius strip" (an oxymoron for those of you who saw it).  It is constructed out of 3 sheetlike mobius strips binded together at the edges. Instead of being made of a single twisted sheet, this one is made of a twisted ring shape, with rectangular edges.

I started by making a "Revolve" with 30 sections

 

I realized about halfway through my construction that I didn't need to break off the edge, and made a completely smooth ring. The "Unweld Vertices" tool was very helpful, since it allowed me to unanchor my origin side, followed by the reanchoring process at the end after all the rotations. Then I made a pretty complicated sketch using the circular pattern tool to make project sketch points I could use to make the origins for the modifications of each section. I couldn't figure out a useful symmetry to exploit to minimize the amount of work I had to do, so I manually applied the rotations. With 30 sections, I had to evenly space out the rotations by 12 degrees with a 6 degree original offset and make sure I rotated the origin axes correctly to rotate on the appropriate radial axis. I'll admit it was a lot more trigonometry than I would have liked, especially considering the irritations regarding the axis constantly realigning during my traversal around the object. This is what my final sketch looked like:

 Notice the profile rectangle in the upper right, which was the cross-sectional face of my revolve shape. Then I folded the pieces segment by segment like this. 

I used the different materials to mark the section where I started and ended the rotation procedure for better visualization. Once I got to the end, after rotating the final set of unwelded vertices, I rewelded the vertices for my final product. Since I did this very carefully and made sure to seal the only possible opening, it imported into BambuLabs and printed without any issues :)

 

 

Results

I was pretty happy with the finished product. My only gripe was that the model did not come out perfectly smoothly: at a few spots the twisting material caused a slide imperfection straying away from the mathematically defined twisting amount. I think this may have worked better in the solid workspace instead, as the constraints would have been applied more strictly. Regardless, It was a good practice to test my knowledge of mathematics as it pertains to creating advanced 3D prints, and produce an attractive outcome. There is a picture of the finished print attached below

 

 

Reflection

There were a lot of lessons to learn here, including the benefits of organizing my work, keeping concise sketches, and separating my sketches with projected points. I had to retrace my work a few times after figuring out how the vertices weld tools worked. I also had a hard time figuring out the easiest way to determine the central rotation point for each segment would be defined. This is a continuation in a long streak of making a simple project prompt, not so simple, but I am really enjoying the opportunity to keep learning. On to the next :)