Works in Progress

Now that I'm armed with a UV printer and a cricut, no surface is safe from being printed, stickered, decal'd or otherwise decorated in some way.

The next surface to be attacked, is my humble sewing machine:

My awesome little sewing partner, a brother bq1350

First up is deciding which parts of the machine to decorate. The panel on the right is too complicated to work around, and we don't really want to rub fabric along a printed surface if we can help it, so the proposed layout looked like so:

Stickers along the top front, the harp, and the bottom right.

To make a template, I started by covering these areas of the machine in masking tape, marking an outline, scanning the resulting shapes, converting them to vector, printing them back out, test fitting them, making adjustments, scanning and vectorizing and printing until I was happy with the shapes.

Prototyping with paper because vinyl is expensive!

Once the shapes started looking pretty good, it was time to test fit with vinyl, and here's where some unexpected snags appeared:

Holy crap, this vinyl is nearly transparent!

Firstly, the most readily available temporary-stick material (Oracal 631) isn't really opaque enough to be usable for light-colored stickers - sewing machines have markings all over them. Secondly, its adhesive was too tacky and had a tendency to deform or tear the vinyl when removing it after a few days. Ideally I'd like to dress up my machine for each season, and reuse the stickers at least a few times. This material isn't going to get me there.

I spoke with a friend of mine who works with printable vinyls and he pointed out that there are a few different features of an adhesive vinyl that can help improve its opacity: just using a different formulation for the print surface, increasing the thickness of the material, and using an opaque (grey or black) adhesive. I went on the hunt for other temporary-stick vinyls with various thicknesses and adhesives, and ordered from a vendor called Drytac.

Bingo! Even their 3mil DryTac is almost fully opaque. The 6mil is definitely opaque, but probably overkill in my case. The adhesive also has the perfect amount of tackiness for working with the ABS shell of this sewing machine - it's easy to reposition, but sticky enough to stay put reliably.

So with shapes and materials sorted, I generated some "art" in midjourney, and it's time to get a prototype ready! I first cut out the shapes on the cricut, and then ran the pre-cut vinyl through the printer with registration marks for alignment and 1/4" bleed for misalignment.

And the first skin of many is complete!

Lego released a kit awhile back to let us builders have our very own HeiHei the rooster, from Moana. As one of my favorite animal sidekicks, obviously I had to have one!

He's a chonky boi though, and stands about 10.5 in sitting on his base. The spot that I have available to display him is closer to 7" tall, and not especially deep! So a good shrink is in the cards. Austin Carlson's design is great, so keeping as much of the set's original look as possible, and trying to only use parts from the original set makes it easier to reconstruct the full kit down the road.

Stud.io has a great feature where it can import all of the parts from a given set directly into its design space. From there, the model can be constructed using the original instructions:

It sure would be nice if the constructed models were available, but this went pretty quickly actually.

I tinkered with the design in Stud.io, transferred the changes to the physical model, and then went back to stud.io and incorporated what I learned a few times. We lose the exaggerated lanky look of the original Heihei character, but wind up with a chibi style that actually works. Here are the two models side by side:

He almost fits on my shelf now, and he's still pretty cute! Good enough for now, and maybe I'll have a chance to revisit this again later.

Almost-fits! And these are the leftover parts.

I've been growing micro-miniature sinningia for a long time. These little troopers have moved across the country multiple times, survived drying out, being drowned, and generally abused and they always bounce back. I recently picked up tubers of a few new-to-me varieties from the inestimable Larry Stacey and planted them all in a fresh 6" cylinder with new sphagnum moss a few months ago. I found these 6" glass beaker covers that do an excellent job of acting as lids for the cylinders - they keep humidity in the cylinders high without compromising visibility of the plants.

Once the snapmaker was installed in its IKEA PAX cabinet, we needed a way to get filament to it! Fortunately there was already a 2" hole in the back of the printer drawer slide that had been used for the bambu's poop chute, that could now be used to feed filament up to the U1 from below.

Starting with the "simplest thing that could possibly work," I printed up some great 1-piece filament roller stands and hung rolls of filament from them. I printed up some clips for ptfe/pneumatic couplers, stuck everything down with command strips and I was off to the races!

attempt #1

This worked sometimes, but I was running into problems with reliability when printing. The single piece stands may work great in some situations, but in my setup with the extended feeder lines, I think there was too much friction from the [very full] spools needing to be dragged along that static roller to feed the print heads.

Ok, no problem! We can print something with an actually ROLLING filament bar. I went looking for models with bearings, and ran into this one (link here):

a nice simple, sturdy design and it even has 3d printed bearings!

I printed up a few of these roller stands to try them out, and sure enough I was having less trouble with the toolheads pushing out inconsistent amounts of filament:

v2: a mixed bag of spool holders

The new stands were working well, but since they're a multi-part setup, it was unclear at first that I can't fit four of these side by side on my PAX slider shelf. Also, it's not difficult exactly to pull the whole stand out of the way to swap rolls, but it could be easier. If I was going to have to do this one more time, I wanted drop-in spool rollers. There are surprisingly few drop-in filament stands out there that accept bearings, and will fit in the space I have.

I eventually ran across this nice narrow double feeder by Robert Schiele and it looked like all my problems were solved:

The stands are narrow enough, and they use bearings!

This was super close, but I wanted each spool to have its own roller, I wanted to print rollers in different sizes, and I needed to resize the stands a little bit. I learned that Robert's design is basically a mesh-glued remix of Vincent Groenhuis' Rewind Spool Holder. The OpenSCAD/step files for these models is supposedly available somewhere, but I ran out of patience looking for them. I decided to just get it over with and reimplement them in Autodesk Fusion so I could tinker around as much as necessary. I drew up some designs that closely followed Vincent's original model, went a few rounds with printing test parts to make sure the stands would fit properly on the shelf, and the bearings would hold snugly in the rollers.

testing that everything fits together

After an evening of test prints and tweaking, we have a new set of stands that fits perfectly in the drawer slide! I also added some nice clips to make sure that the left and right spools were feeding from the middle instead of the edges. The designer was kind enough to share fusion files for the clips, which really helped here!

v3: success!

Recently, a friend of mine reached out, offering me a good deal on his barely-used Snapmaker U1. I said "Yes, please!" because I was eager to see if having faster multicolor printing would prompt me to use it more often.

Except, there were a few hiccups with adding a U1 to my life:

I live in a small apartment, I own 2 3d printers, and there isn't room for a third

Assuming I was willing to sell one of my existing printers to make room, the only place I have to install the U1 is in my 18" IKEA Pax wardrobe. The U1 has filament feeders and spool holders mounted to the sides and there's no way it'll fit!

Here's what my original printing setup looked like with 2 Bambus:

AMS units on rollers above the printers, and the printer on a roller shelf as well.

I put the printer through its paces and it's DEFINITELY powerful enough to replace one of my X1C's. So, first problem solved!

As for the second problem, fortunately this guy had done most of the homework for me. It turns out the snapmaker works just fine with the feeders and side spool holders removed! Where Janzis used plywood, I just 3D printed four rectangular risers for the feet instead of making a trip to the hardware store.

It was also pretty clear that the snapmaker was going to be better off feeding from below, and it needs a lot of clearance above - so the shelves and rollers were going to need to be moved around.

Lego's Japanese Red Maple Bonsai Tree set (10348) is my least favorite build, ever. The construction is a bit repetitive, and the final tree doesn't quite "pop" enough relative to its rather large size, so it's not fun to display either, for those of us without infinite display space. However, it's been a great starting point for kitbashing - I didn't love the weird "butterfly" leaves on one of the Mini Bonsai Trees and turned it into a mini japanese maple tree that I think looks much better and gets the "maple tree" effect across without being huge. More recently, I adapted Love Birds and leaves from that set onto the original Japanese Maple trunk and I think that the overall smaller footprint shows off the birds pretty nicely.

*also pictured: Modern Wall Shelves by 5iStanley