It works!

When the phone holder came out of the printer the first thing that I did was test it to make sure that it actually would hold the phone and prop it up so I could have it on my desk and watch videos on my phone from an angle. As I stated earlier, I wish that the ledge where the phone sits was a bit more angled to secure the phone better as if it gets nudged it can easily fall off of the stand. However, it still gets the job done efficiently but if I had the chance to go back and tweak the measurements I would. Overall, I am really happy with how my print came out and I think it will be very useful and functional for me to use while working at my desk. This project was a great introduction for me to 3D printing and I am excited to learn more and possibly have the chance to print more designs! 

Here are some pictures of my phone on the phone holder:

Painting it!

After the product was all smoothed out it was ready to be painted. I wanted to paint my 3D print to make it more creative and put my own style into it. I decided to just paint a simple flower on the top of the print. I painted a base coat and let it dry overnight and the next day painted the flower which took me about an hour to complete.

Here are some pictures of that process.

Base coat of paint:

Beginning to paint the flower: 

Final product: 

All done printing

After the 15 hours of printing, it came out looking great!

Here are some photos of the phone holder when it was done with printing.

The next step with this project was to get rid of the supports and clean up some of the rough edges of the print. My dad helped me with this and using his tools we got the phone holder looking smooth around the edges and we took off all the extra pieces. We used 60 grit sandpaper to smoothe the inside and the edges. We also used wood chisels and a hammer to chisel off/ knock off some of the spare plastic pieces. 

Here are some videos of part of the process.

And here's a photo of the holder all smoothed out.

One critique that I have about my print is the dip where the phone sits. I thought that the ledge would have been a little deeper to hold the phone a bit more secure but with a little nudge it can fall off easily. If the ledge was a bit more angled it most likely would have worked better for the purpose that I wanted. It still turned out great and will be very useful to have on my desk to prop up my phone!

Ready to print!

When everything was all ready and looked correct in Print Studio, I used an SD card and my MacBook to import the file to the Dremel printer. The filament that I used was the PLA plastic filament (pink). The printer displayed that it would take 15 hours to print.

Here are some photos of the phone holder beginning to print.

Importing to Print Studio

When importing my STL file from Tinkercad to Print Studio to prepare to print, Print Studio detected that the product was too large to print and I had to work on making it smaller. This became a bit of a road bump for me in the printing process and took a little bit longer to resize it where it would still work. The problem was that the print was too tall but you couldn't change one dimension without changing all of them. I ended up changing the dimensions to x= 120 mm, y=117.39 mm, and z= 84.78 mm. This caused the print to be smaller than I wanted it to be but with the new measurements the phone still fit on the stand and ended up not being an issue. Print Studio added some supports to the design and below is a screengrab of the supports that were added.

Here is a screen recording of the file before being sent to the 3D printer. 

First steps of designing my 3D print

When deciding what to I wanted to print I knew that I wanted something that would be functional and also creative. I decided to look up some ideas on the internet and I wanted to build off of those ideas that I found. I have been needing something to prop up my phone with while I'm at my desk and watching videos off of my phone so I decided to print a phone holder in the shape of a shoe (I love shoes and have a bit of a collection). I saw a picture of this sort of design online and put my own spin on it. The first thing that I did was went into the website Cookie Caster and traced an image of a shoe to use as the holder for the phone.

Here is a screen recording of that process. 

I then went into the website Tinkercad and created a base for the shoe to stand on. I measured that the base would need to be at least 158.2 mm wide to fit the phone horizontally, so on Tinkercad I went ahead and made the base that big all the way around. I wanted the phone holder to be sturdy and so it needed a strong base. 

Here is the base that I designed using Tinkercad.

I then imported my shoe design from Cookie Cutter into Tinkercad and fit it on top of the base. I made it 160 mm all around. It took me a little while to get it centered and straight to my liking but I finally got it to how I wanted. I then had to group the two objects together using Tinkercad so that it would not print as two different objects. 

Here is the final product on Tinkercad. 

Qlone Scan of Starfish

This blog post is the first part of my 3D project in DGST 201. I scanned a starfish using the Qlone app on my iPhone.

Starfish by victoriagrantumw on Sketchfab