mathmtcs: Lissajous

Finally, I've got some moderate success to report with my Lissajous figure.

Yesterday I tried printing with raft and supports (because of printing difficulties without).

somehow reminds me of the World Series trophy

So the figure printed, although it took a long time (a little over two hours) because extruding all the extra plastic for the supports was a significant addition. Then, afterwards, the supports needed to be broken out.

removing supports with my handy dandy leatherman tool

And that's where the issues arose. Even though I repaired the .stl file with visCAM and netfabb, the intersections points were still weak, and I could see light coming through them. They didn't appear to be solid connections. The physical stress of breaking off the supports was more than the structure could deal with, and it began to break. "Don't worry," people told me, "you can superglue it back together." But that's not the point. I wanted to print as a single piece.

printed with supports, mostly removed, but lost integrity of the plot in the process

I thought of taking the piece home and use my Dremel rotary tool to get the rest of the supports off. But I left school in a hurry, and neglected to pack it.

While doing whatever it is I do when not at work, an idea came to me -- rotate the figure 90 degrees in the y-z plane. The problem had been my horizontal spans had been too long, but by rotating I'd change those horizontals to verticals. Verticals don't typically have as much issue printing.

So that's what I tried this morning. Using the exact same .stl file, I used MakerWare to rotate, and printed with rafts but without supports. Success!