Jewellery project

Hello there, the next project I am taking on is creating and printing jewellery. After discussion with the jeweller, the most useful use of printed jewellery was for creating samples for making moulds from. This would only be possible if the makerbot was capable of printing with sufficient accuracy and detail to make it viable.

To start with, I made this simple ring just to see how well the printer handles it. I put it into the makerbot pretty confident that it would print nicely. I even used the high detail settings in the makerware taking the layer thickness to 0.1mm. It didn't turn out. The top and inside seemed to be alright but the bottom half of the outside didn't print well at all, the surface seemed to be missing. I needed the raft because the plastic couldn't seem to stick well enough on such a small footprint.

So I tried again, this time with the standard settings that used 0.2mm layer height. The results were the same but worse. It was missing the same part but the detail was much cruder.

It was possible that it was my model that was unsuitable so I tried to print it using the up printer. As you can see below, the results were much more consistent. The surface was even all around, it snapped off the base pretty easily. This was nice but it meant that it wasn't my design it was the printer which was worrying.

I designed a few rings based on photos I found on the Internet, you can see on the bottom right corner the two twisty type rings. The black one was done in the makerbot, the white in the up printer. Both were failures. The support structure on both of them was hard to remove and didn't come off cleanly. The resulting pieces were quite weak and had too much surface disruption to be even close to being suitable for moulding.

This is the other ring that I modelled in blender, it wasn't too hard to do and I was hopeful that it would print out nicely.

As you can see below, the ring printed out relatively nicely but it was over sized. After removing the supports the resulting finish was like the other ring, it left a lumpy surface behind that would be impossible to smooth without breaking it.

It seems that the makerbot just isn't capable of producing the fine detail at that size needed for mould production. This is disappointing but I need to finish the project so I will change tack.

I will go for high quality rendered images of jewellery that I have designed. I will begin by sketching up a few designs then modelling, texturing then rendering them.