February, 2018 - Daniel Kenneth

February 26, 2018

3D Print Painting

This weekend, I promised my co-worker I would spend some time doing some painting on some of the 3D items he requested. Why? Because I volunteer myself for everything.

I’ve done many many paintings, but 3D Prints are a bit hard to paint. First, they have a texture from the plastic layers (unless you do some post-processing). Second, they’re 3D, and unlike a painting, they don’t have any definite lines where the paint should stop. Third, I didn’t prime the object, because I printed it in the character’s main color so it took many layers to cover the green plastic. And last, I didn’t give it a clear coat to lock it all in, so I’m just waiting for him to accidentally scrape some of the paint off.

Basically, it can easily come out looking very messy. My co-worker seemed to really like it this morning when I brought it in, so maybe I’m being too picky. I hope it gets easier once I get a few more painted.

February 19, 2018July 17, 2020

Dehydrating All the Fruits

I don’t know why I do the things I do. Most things I decide to do are done on a whim. Last week I went to Costco and bought a ton of fruit. Why? I don’t know, I just felt like doing it. I bought apples, pears, dragonfruit… Then I took it home to dehydrate all the fruit.

Mostly, I was excited to try this fruit and vegetable sheet cutter by Kitchenade.

How easy would it be to dehydrate the fruits with this? No slicing or peeling.

And it was easy, except when you do it this way, a single apple will fill several levels of my large dehydrator because the apple sheets are so thin. Days later I have almost all the fruit dehydrated. I still have one batch left to do tonight.

I learned 2 things from this experience:

First, dragonfruit is gross when dehydrated. Like, really gross. When it’s dehydrated it turns into a dry slice of seeds and tastes like dirt. At $5 or $6 a fruit, it’s basically a lot of expensive garbage. So don’t do that…. or try blending it and remove the seeds.

Second, the sheet cutter does not do well with very ripe fruit. My pears were pretty ripe and it basically made pulverized it into pear sauce. I got a bunch of pear sheets, but most of them ended up being a mess and I had to slice what was left by hand.

February 15, 2018

John is the Terminator

I’m pretty sure John is trying to take over my 3D Printer. He decided we needed to do another 3D scan and turn him into the terminator.

Surrounding his print with gallium, now he’s the Terminator being melted at the end of the movie. He may need to do some chrome spray paint, but overall it’s was a pretty fun idea.

February 14, 2018

Roger Smith

I finally printed something for my desk. Everyone else has little chotskies all over their desks and mine just has paper everywhere. So I browsed the 3D repositories for something I’d like and found Roger Smith from American Dad on thingyverse.

As soon as John (the guy I 3D scanned) saw it on my desk he took it. What a jerk! This is why I can’t have nice things. And why I shouldn’t bring my 3D prints into the office.

At least I can just print another.

February 12, 2018

3D Body Scanning of John

My coworker John was excited when I came in this morning. “WHERE IS IT?” he shouted as I passed his office.

I had been annoying him with different methods of 3D scanning. I kept taking him to one of the big open rooms in the office so I could walk around him and take photos or use different types software on my phone to see what would work best. I was excited someone was willing to let me do it, turns out not many people want to be 3D scanned. After many attempts, we found nothing was really working well.

Finally, I remembered I had bought a Structure sensor for my iPad years ago. I had the sensor but couldn’t find the darn cables anywhere. I ordered new ones and as soon as they came in I bothered him again to stand perfectly still in the middle of an open room while I slowly walked around him letting the software do its thing.

I dumped the results to my workstation and found we finally had a usable result.

So this morning when he was shouting at me, I produced the mini-John printing.

It could use some work, especially on the top of the head. But, overall, I was pretty happy that we finally got it to work. I still need to work on full body scans. We tried that as well but the room we were in was making it pretty difficult. I told him on a nice day we’ll have to go to the parking lot and give it another shot.