Thursday, October 21, 2010

Built-in color graphics

This weekend I built some parts with shiny, colorful graphics built-in.


I embossed a thin extrusion of a heart-shape, 0.17mm thick, onto the tops of four parts. For building, I arranged the parts on the table (not as shown) with the embossed graphic parallel to the build platform. (The SD300's build software has a 1-click tool to do that.)


I built most of the model in white material, then switched to red material for the last layer. Hence most of the model was white, but the embossed heart shape was built using red. The excess red material simply peeled away with the supports, leaving the red graphic integrated into the model.


The finished parts have the colorful heart graphic integrated right into the model. Unfortunately, red is the only SD300 material that seems to offer enough contrast for this technique. The "black" material isn't dark in thin sections (but I'm working on a workaround). Solido lists "blue" material for the machine, but dealers don't have any inventory.

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