Thread by @mathgrrl

Round 3 of trying to reprint the giant spiky knot our kitty broke. It’s a four day print even at fast/0.2mm layer height. This iteration will use Pro Yellow PLA and “breakaway” supports. Fingers crossed!

Here's a picture of the lovely - but now broken - "Perko knot" that we'll be reprinting (hopefully) over the next few days. You can read about that saga, which includes dissolvable supports and unruly prime towers, in our old post at Hacktastic: mathgrrl.com/hacktastic/201…

So far so good. Yellow ring around the outside is the “brim”, to help the print stick. White grid is the first layer, on top of that is “zig-zag” supports. Yellow bits are the bottoms of the lowest spikes. Solid white bits are the “interface” between the supports and the model.

Still on track! Supports look like they might break nicely and the prime tower isn’t going to win a beauty contest but it’s still standing strong

Good morning! The printer has been hard at work all night and everything is still roses. I love how you can look through the support lines and see the model floating in there

Meet the series of unfortunate events:

😭 Round 0 was great but was attacked by our cat.
🤨 Round 1 stopped extruding orange mysteriously.
😢 Round 2 had an “out of bounds” error while printing.

Goodnight sleep tight

Almost to the height of Round 1... about halfway done

I have to admit I tried to take that same photo last night after coming home from a holiday party and in my exuberance and holiday joy I accidentally bumped the printhead... went to bed nervous but here we are in the morning and it's a new day and everything seems fine :)

Prime tower yeahhhh

Update on this fine snowy day: still doubleplus good

The display says 1 day and 8 hours left, but I think it may finish late tomorrow. See you in the morning

Loops are starting to close up, nearing the finish line... display says 22 hours

So relaxed, probably dreaming of how he might break our yellow knot when it is done printing

The printer says 13 hours left, but I can’t believe that. It looks so... close

Not much left to go: top of one loop, super long horizontal bit, and one last tall loop over that. It’s the horizontal bit that makes me nervous. Come on yellow you can do this

Here's what the print looks like layer by layer in Cura, with and without supports

I’m afraid even to get close to the machine right now. Display says 8 hours left. Okay maybe... but at any rate it is bedtime. Everyone please dream of success!

omg omg omg

Have to go now to give a final exam to some calculus students so I’m going to miss the end of this print, but will update when I can!

SUCCESSSSSS 🌈🍰👾
(Thx to @rileypb for catching this video while I’m at my final exam)

Step 1: Get this thing off the build plate

Step 2: Can't find my good tools, please laugh at my attempts to remove supports with crappy tools (and check out the breakaway support action around the 1:10 mark)

(if you don't click on the video then it's at the 0:37 backwards countdown mark)

Step 3, in which I buy myself a present from the hardware store and then accidentally extract a tooth

This is taking one million years. Too much for video but here is a pic of this little interior arc that we managed to liberate. Breakaway support material does leave a nice finish and no marks but it isn’t easy to break away from these teeth

Breakaway breaking-away update:

Went and got my favorite pair of flush cutters from the lab today and was finally able to make some real progress on Mr. Teeth

(Lame update: finals, grading, now out of town in DC so not picking support material out of teeth until after this weekend...)

I did however print a normal sized spiky knot to give to @standupmaths today so he can have fun with support material too. What a little thing

I originally designed this knot as a demo model for the UM3 that would really require dissolvable filament. Apparently I did an excellent job :/

In related news, we are finally almost done removing these very non-dissolvable supports!

DONE and we didn’t break it! Better pix and a blog post tomorrow. Tonight we raise a glass

@standupmaths Printing a “baby corn” of our own to keep Mr. Teeth company :)

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