How good can a MakerBot printed object look?
The answer is “better than the original.”
Better than the original
I had first seen Ian Johnson‘s Soap Dish on Thingiverse months ago, thought “cool,” and moved on. A few days ago I stumbled upon Ian’s Flickr photostream and finally got the full story.
This is the original soap dish from Pottery Barn. It rests in a fixture attached to the wall, from which it has fallen many times and broken. It can’t be replaced because the line has been discontinued, but I want to continue to use the fixture, since the pedestal sink doesn’t really have room for a soap dish.
Ian designed a replacement soap dish in halves, so it would fit on the MakerBot print platform and asked Will Langford to print the parts for him. He then glued the two halves together with black ABS drain pipe cement from the hardware store, dipped the dish in an ABS cement/acetone bath to smooth out the texture, sanded it smooth, painted it with his ABS dip to give it a glossy finish, and then gave it several coats of white liquid plastic. For more information on Ian’s exact process as well as his photos of the intermediate stages, check out his photostream.
You can still see the faceting on one end that was a result of my not creating my model at a high enough resolution. I could have smoothed that out with enough filling and sanding, but didn’t want to bother. It’s only a soap dish after all. An indestructible soap dish.
Until I saw Ian’s finished product, I had no idea just how good a MakerBot printed object could look. You can bet I’m going to use this process in the very near future.
| Tagged with | abs bath, fixing with makerbot, flickr, ian johnson, makerbot fixes, makerbot replacement, plastic dip, replacement parts | 2 comments |
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