Look what we did! Mary Rodes Dell came by this afternoon and I plied her with curry and she worked strange magics and turned my scribbling into a 3D thingie!
It took Mary maybe 30 minutes to do this? Even with her talking me through it, it would have taken me days, and at the end of those days, it still wouldn’t have looked this good. That’s expertise, people.
I was proud of myself that when the 3D printer stopped actually printing, I did not panic, or make Kevin come help me, but calmly googled and tried things until I figured out what was wrong (dried filament in the feed tube had cracked after months of disuse, so it wasn’t feeding properly), AND fixed it. Go, me.
It’s going to take some more iterating before we get a workable prototype — for one, the letters in feast are too far apart, especially the a and s, and I think I’d like the f to not go quite as high. And the whole structure is fragile enough that it was super-hard breaking off the support pieces and base, enough so that I gave up after 10 minutes of poking it at it with a knife (can the support pieces tilt out more? Be thinner? Can we skip the base?).
We may or may not get a functional napkin ring out of this. But regardless, super-satisfying designing something unique (it says feast in both English and Tamil — Mary’s brilliant idea to do a bilingual version) and watching it come to life so quickly. And I learned a ton! Thanks, Mary!
Now, any recommendations for something I can download from thingiverse and print for Kevin? It’s his birthday…