Letter Bowls

My wife asked me to make some bowls in the shape of letters for a birthday party. I went ahead and made the whole alphabet and put it up on thingiverse.




http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:117513?save=success

 

NICE PRINTED!!!!!!!

 

Those would be some biiiiig ice cubes!

For me, at a 1.2mm wall, these don't hold water.

I'm actually going to hardware store to look into non-toxic clear coat options today. Will post here if I come across anything good.

 

I like Mkelly's question, do they? Depends probably on material right?

 

Yeah, I was going to mention scaling, but it was just too much fun to imagine a giant ice cube.
It does flex alright with a thin wall, but PLA would probably make a really bad ice cube tray. It is strong, but relatively brittle at room temp, so I'm sure it gets worse when frozen. It will probably shatter when you give it a few cracks to break it loose. I suspect that it would stick pretty obnoxiously to all of the ridges.

I think you could probably do an ice cube tray of these in vapor polished ABS easily enough though. Give it a good long time to offgas any residual acetone. You'd probably want to design it rather than using my letters though. Put in some taper, round the bottom so it can print without support, and put a rim around it.

As I mentioned in my thingiverse description, you do have the whole 'food safe' question that you would have to feel comfortable with as well.

 

Printed I am puzzled by the water holding aspect you mentioned I was making one of those tornado vases that everyone seems to have and I had I think a 2 layer base and 2 wall perimeter with no fill as I wanted it hollow but was printing at 200 microns and after the print failed after about 2cm I actually was curious about how well it held liquid so I filled it up granted the area was about the size of a 50 cent piece and about 2cm tall but I filled it up placed it on a paper towel and it didn't leak or even sweat through into the paper towel eventually it just evaporated the coloring in the liquid stained the Glow in the Dark PLA I was using but it did not leak I wonder why yours did.

 

I don't think I would use these bowls with liquid in them anyways, but that's interesting. I'll have to play around with different settings. I do have glow in the dark green robo PLA, and USPS says my machine will be here Tuesday so maybe I'll try repeating some of your successful vessel builds.

Honestly, I hadn't given it a whole heck of a lot of thought. I've seen other people print stuff that leaked and know how the process works, so I assumed that it was pretty much a given that you'd see leaks on most parts.

 

if you try the tornado vase and it does leak let me know and I can try and dig up my print parameters in more detail to more fully compare notes.

 

For those of you thinking of things to use your printer for over the Holidays, I've had a lot of requests for these for Holiday parties and as unique gift packaging. If someone feels like making a remix with 26 lids, I wouldn't complain

 

so what are your current thoughts on the whole food safe thing

 

That's always a fun question isn't it?
I only use these for decorative or dry/packaged food contact.

Aside from that, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the topic.

 

chicken LOL