CA, do you have any idea when they will be officially fir sale? I am definitley interested

I'll be selling just as soon as I've sorted out the universal hole and plug design.

Just not had much time on the 3d print side recently.
The last week or two any time I've had has usually been spent with the printer on her side.
We've moved the on off switch from the front to the back, fitted a very neat ducting system that blows air directly on the area being printed. Wired up a 24 volt fan to the motherboard of the printer to power that. And next I have to figure a way to reaattach the print bed so that the new duct system doesn't interfere. At the moment it knocks off the bulldog clips. So no more bulldog clips.

I did spend all of yesterday at the tct show in birmingham - the uks largest 3d print exhibition.
According to dave I didn't stop talking the whole six hours we were there. I was too busy chatting to notice
Great show - the industry has progressed amazingly in the last 12 months.  Some truly gobsmacking ideas and technology.  

I might be getting a desktop 3d scanner. I was trying to convince the project lead from Matter & Form that at least one of the demo scanners she had with her, really didn't need to go back to the states. 

We'll see.

But I'll get the final mould designs done asap. It's only changing round a couple of lines in each file and trying to thicken the text a little.

I'm also going to sign up for 3d hubs. Which sounds cool. 3dhubs get requests for things people want and then farms it out to someone in the local area and you get together with the person and print it for them. 3dhubs handle the admin and money side and take a percentage. But it sounds like a good place to start making geraldine pay for herself And i reallly hate admin.

I checked their site and there isn't anyone in my area. And I definitely can meet their quality criteria.
They use  a little marvin character as test and the last one I printed was better than anything they had on their stand at the show (curtesy of the ducting setup)

Anyway - the bloody harddrive I've been waiting for hasn't turned up yet, so I'll go do the mould and get geraldine right side up and working again.

I've got a whole stack of sample filament to try out - so the first few moulds might come in some fairly exotic filaments.

One firm even sells filaments with bronze and copper. That polish up and look just like metal. Weirdly the copper one looks and feels like stoneware pottery before it's sanded and polished. So I might get a roll of that as it's dual purpose.

Here's the final design. With and without text

I'll take one with no text. I have some clay ready to go.

Just out of interest, would it be possible to produce a spherical mould with exactly the same volume as the glande shape? One thing I have had my mind on is doing a direct comparison experiment of glande vs sphere for identical weight projectiles, and quantifying the advantage that the glande shape gives you.

PandaMan wrote on Oct 1^st, 2014 at 3:46pm:


see previous post: Quote:


@ david.
Actually as I start with  a sphere and then rescale it to make the glande - that should be pretty simple.
Probably need to change the depth of the moulds. But that's not a problem.

Well, this is an oblate spheroid, just a sphere stretched along orthogonal directions, like the code you posted on page 1:

Quote:


If that assumption is correct, you can figure out the volume by taking the volume of the original sphere and multiplying it by the 3 scaling factors (yay linear transformations!).

In your case, the scaling is multiplying the volume by 0.5 * 1.1 * 0.5 = 0.275

In order to get a perfect sphere of the same volume, you need to scale the radius r. Now the radius occurs as a 3rd power in the volume formula of a sphere (4/3 * pi * r^3), so you need to take that into account by multiplying the radius of the new sphere by the 3rd root of 0.275, i.e. 0.6503

brilliant !
thank you very much. I'll try that as soon as I finish sorting out all the bloody sick laptops that have accumulated in my workshop this week
I'm not going to pretend I understand the maths

So thanks again  

I can use that formula to set up a fully parametric mold 'program'. 

I don't know how I missed this thread. Some very interesting stuff, if you are open for business I would like to place an order.

algorias wrote on Oct 8^th, 2014 at 6:09am:


The calculations seem correct to me