In a previous post, I mentioned that my wife is into Zodiac signs and all that mystical stuff. I’m not into it and actually actively discouraged her from enjoying it because I thought it was weird. Well weird or not, I’ve come to realize that just as I suppressed all of the joys in my life, so was I also suppressing something that brought joy into hers. So I’ve learned to at a minimum keep my mouth shut when she’s enjoying her thing. But when I asked her if she wanted me to print things, she started giving me a list. And here are a few of those. Above are a pair of Chinese dragons. I don’t know what the significance of them are, but thought they were cool and would look cooler with the gold filament I just picked up for the next project below. They came out so nice I ended up printing a second pair and have them in my office.
I had a few failures between the golden dragons and these cool Chinese New Year dragons. My wife wanted some good luck envelopes printed out that I guess were too thin as the gold mixed with the red and turned into blotches. After two fails, I decided to kick off the red dragons above. This was also my first multi color print which I also discovered takes a long time. The four took almost 2 days to print! This was also the first print I made that required supports. I wondered how they would look and I don’t have to wonder any more. I’m going to end up printing another 4 here in the next week per request from my kids who want a pair each.
Sticking with the dragon theme, I found a project involving printing a dragon and placing it in a printable shell. This was my first multi part project as I had to first print the dragon, and then halfway through the print of the egg, I had to place the dragon inside before finishing off the egg. Of course I forgot to take a pic of the dragon before putting it inside. I plan on giving this away so I don’t want to break it. This has given me a few ideas on how to get rid of some of the basic cards I get out of the sports card boxes I open. I’m thinking of putting them inside an egg and giving them away.
Final project in the last couple of weeks. I was bummed about not being able to give my wife that lucky envelope she wanted so I searched for some that looked like potential successes. My first try was the one above. It’s also more like a really thing box than an envelope which is why I thought it would work out better. Being a box, the “walls” could be printed a little thicker so the contrasting filament would show better. The previous attempts were really thin and the red washed out the gold. I also used yellow filament (third trip to Microcenter!) to see if maybe it would be better contrasting than the gold. I think in this case it was the right call.
She was super happy about this one and wants me to print more of them so she can give them away. I have a month so I’ll space them in between longer projects. All in all, it’s been a fun couple of weeks with the Bambu A1! It seems like I find more things that I want to print, and my growing collection of filament reflects that. Now that I’ve tried four color printing, I’m starting to look at higher end printers capable of more colors. This is turning out to be a really expensive hobby, but the fact that my wife enjoys the results as much as I do makes it worth it. I can’t wait for my kids to ask me to print things. I’m sure they’ll come up with some cool projects. Have any interesting projects that you think I’d be interested in? #3dprinting