Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Dirty Tentacles - Print Cleaning

Nope. Not tentacle porn. Sorry.

Just to give you an idea of the process with the tentacles, it takes about 20 minutes with a toothpick to get all the support material out of the joints. This is partly my own fault due to the tentacle design.  Then it gets blasted out with compressed air.  Next it gets scrubbed with a toothbrush, then into the lye bath for 30 minutes, then rinsed and dried with compressed air.  This times eight. Curse you octopi!  The effort is worth it because a piece that still has even seemingly unnoticeable amounts of support material on it looses a ton of detail.  Also worth mentioning that this is on my end. It doesn't take into account that the print lab blasts it with a water jet, also does a lye bath and blasts it again.  This is part of the reason that 3D printing isn't quite ready for mass production. That and the cost.

Check out the slideshow: