Heya Photon Fans. Time for another installment of "Adventures in Photon Chainmail".
Today's project, printing joiner pieces to connect swatches. At the moment, all the swatches on my Thingiverse have solid ring edges. I did a little test knit last week, and joined two swatches by clipping some of the rings, knitting the swatches together, then re-joining the rings with resin spots.
That process was an absolute pain in the backside, and of the 15 rings I attempted to cut and rejoin, only 12 were successful. I've been working on modelling up some dedicated joiner pieces that are printed with gaps in the rings ahead of time. That way I can just weave them into a 'standard' swatch, zap the gaps in the rings, and away I go.
Today's results - 11/10. More successful than I was possibly hoping for. I printed up two types of joiner for the hex mail pattern. One's just a single link where all 6 rings are broken. The other joiner is a line of links, solidly connected to each other, but with open rings on the top and bottom. I've put about a 0.5mm gap in the top of each open ring, with a 30 degree chamfer on it to make things easier to slide in.
I printed off two of the long strips, and a handful of the single joiners, and got to work testing. I specifically used red resin for the patching and blue for the parts, so it's clear where the patches are and where the base part is. I snipped off a 5-link length from one of the chains, and spliced in 4 of the single-link joiners along the top.
The results kind of speak for themselves. The size of the gaps is absolutely perfect for a little bead of resin to fill them in when applied with a paintbrush. The first few I did (on the left hand side) I was over cautious and didn't get quite enough resin on there. The rest of them I picked up a good-sized drop and they came out perfectly!
Next test, printing off a few more swatches and a few more joiners, probably in different colours, and targeting producing a mousepad-sized swatch in an interesting patchwork layup. to see how that works out.
This is also a big step in the longer-run project to produce printed resin bracelets, since I'll now be able to print off some sort of clip/latch arrangement, and easily stitch it onto the end of a run of mail which I can cut-to-fit the recipient.
(Oh, and if anyone's wondering why the joiner pieces look so smooth in the slicer, it's because the STLs were exported at obscenely high resolution. The 10-link long joiner strip is a 129Mb STL. I think I may want to re-export them before adding them to Thingiverse.....)
翻譯年糕
Christian Sargent
2019-03-09 04:46:38
David McGyver
2019-03-09 10:57:20
