Rotation:  | 
				

How the objects were arranged and oriented for printing.

Material Use: About 8g (0.02lb)

Print Time: About 45 minutes

117 layers

Dimensions:

• x- 51.6mm
• y- 35.91mm
• x- 22.51mm

I didn’t start out this project with an idea of what specifically I was going to print.  MY idea only calls for an object that is meaningful to me.  On Monday of week 8 I was exploring in TinkerCad and decided to see what would happen if I used the cookie cutter technique we used to make the french table leg, but with words instead of the shape of the table leg.  What this produced were objects that on one side show a letter, and have a different letter on a different side.  The result of this experiment is my final printed object.  Almost immediately after creating these letter object some of my classmates came over and asked me what I made and how I made it.  This accidental creation received awesome reactions that day, but the conversation I has with Katie about it stands out to me.  Katie was so excited about my discover and all of its possibilities.  I was struggling to decide what to print, but when I thought of my conversation with Katie, I felt good.  I realized that these letters fit the needs for my project perfectly.  These letters have no obvious use or purpose, but are meaningful to me.  Of course, in my conversation with Katie she suggested that I could turn these letters into a word puzzle, giving them a use.  I have discovered though that it would be impossible to create a useless object, at least for the purpose of this project.  If I create something to use for my project, it is useful.  When I think of my letters, I feel good.  They have meaning to me.  Another aspect I had been thinking about was trying to create an object that is meaningful to only me.  I think this might be impossible as well, unless only I know of the object.

At first once I had settled on this idea, I thought I would print a set of letters that spelled my name from one side, but all had the letter A on the other.  This turned out to not be as easy as I thought because one of the letter combinations seems to be impossible to print on a Makerbot without supports, at least working with the limitations of Tinkercad.  This wasn’t a problem for very long because I quickly decided to instead print a set of letters that from one side reads my first name, and from the other side my last name.  The only problem I ran into with this design was that my last name is one letter longer than my first name, so I had to add my middle initial to the end of my first name to make it even.  From there, I only had to turn some of the letter combos on their sides or upside down to ensure proper printing.