Do you have a broken piece of plastic you want to replace? I'll show you how you can scan it in on
a paper scanner and then 3D print it. I'll show you all the steps on today's Filament Friday.
Filament Friday is brought to you every week by the generous donations of these Patreon
supporters. I tripped on the cable and I broke the clip that holds it to the microphone stand
and I thought, you know this is a good opportunity to show how you can scan this in and then 3d print
it. Now I could go to Thingiverse and get a clip, there's a ton of them out there.
But that's not as much fun. Or I can buy it. Man, these are expensive. So I'm not going that route.
But I wanted to show you that you can actually scan in a simple design using
just a paper scanner. You could just glue the two pieces together and then put it on the scanner.
I just put them in place and then I put paper over so I didn't get blinded by the scanner.
If I put the cover over, they kept moving. So it scans the part and here's the picture I got.
It's not bad. Now I've got to get rid of that background so it's transparent. I'm using Preview
on my Mac and there's an isolation tool where you can go in and take away that background.
Just about any picture editor has this capability now. But you have to get rid of that background.
And then once that's gone you may scan and find those little spots that it's picking up.
You can just use a drawing tool and fill those in if you have to. I actually filled in the
crack up here and actually rounded it off so it was nice and solid before I converted it.
This is a png file. I need to convert it to svg and this is the site that I used. I'll
put a link to this in the description below. All you do is load up your png file and then
your settings you can use. I just changed the speckles to 1000. That seemed to work really well.
And then I started a conversion. And when it's done, after about 30 seconds to a minute,
you have a file ready to download that is a .svg. And this we can import into a cad
program. Here's what mine looked like when I was done. It looks really clean and very smooth.
I'm ready to bring this into Timercad and convert it into a 3D object.
Now you can use any CAD program you want. I like Tinkercad. It's nice and easy
you just import the .svg file and it comes in like this. Now it's much bigger than the actual clip so
I'm going to bring in the ruler tool and I'm going to resize this. So the original clip was about 27
and a half so I'm going to change it to 27 and a half in the x-direction. And 36 I'll make a 36.5
in the y-direction. And now I need the height. So it's 12.9 I'll just make it 13 millimeters tall.
And there we have our clip. It's that easy. Now I have this for the future and I can modify
it any way I want. But now I need to convert this into an STL file. So I just go to export
STL and then I can bring it right into Cura. So here's the clip in Cura and I just need
to slice it. Now I'm going to use the standard quality in Cura 4.8 which is a 0.2 layer height.
I'm going to use two outer shells, which is pretty standard, and then four top and bottom layers. So
that should give it some strength, and some actual flexibility, a little bit, as well.
But I am going to go with an infill, a high infill of 50% with a cubic infill pattern. That will be
somewhat triangulated. Now I am going to print this on a raft only because I'm printing this
on my time-lapse mechanism. So I don't want this breaking off. But this thing will probably print
fine without a raft. So I'm going to slice it and it says 41 minutes to print this and
5 grams of plastic. So real easy. Here it is. I'll just go through and take a look at it so
make sure it looks good. You can see it's kind of triangulated inside and the two outer walls.
So this is looking really good. And it'll print from the bottom up like this in my time-lapse.
So let's send it to the printer and here it is printing on the time-lapse, which didn't come out
as good as I'd like, but the clip came out really good. And the raft just broke away. And this clip
is looking really smooth. Now the real test; did I get my dimensions right? So let's try it on the
microphone stand. And it snaps in place perfectly and holds the cable. Now I can print some more.
If you break something like this or maybe even a piece of a plastic toy, try scanning it in and
see if you can 3D print it. And let me know what you think of this idea in the comments below. If
you like what I'm doing here maybe check out some of the videos that are popping up. And if nothing
else click on that CHEP logo and subscribe. I'll see you next time right here at Filament Friday.