Ashtray

thingiverse

I scoured the area and stumbled upon an ashtray that caught my eye. I hit print and got to work with it right away. But oh boy, what a disaster! Everything reeked of burnt plastic. I sat down and thought about how to get the heat out and came up with using aluminum foil. I recalled seeing Alu ashtrays as disposable items before. That's when it dawned on me - I could build my own press. But doing ashtrays wasn't enough; I also wanted to punch in logos. That meant I needed an image editing program like Gimp. I only accepted PNG pictures, and they had to be reduced to 200x200 pixels or less, saved as "Pic1.png." And of course, it had to be a grayscale picture, right alongside the .scad-file. Next, I took that same picture and made it darker using the threshold tool, saving it as "Pic2.png." A light gray should turn into a dark gray, while black lines should thicken up just a bit. That's because OpenScad relies on brightness to determine stamp height. And since the counterpart needs to be darker still, there's room for aluminum foil. Before first use, give those molds a good sanding with some sandpaper. If you don't have a vice, a fat guy will do the trick - just be prepared for some elbow grease. Not all aluminum foils are created equal; you'll need to set your sizes accordingly. A 30x60 cm piece of foil is about 0.13 mm thick when cut down to 15x15 cm. But at 10x10 cm, it's already a whopping 0.17 mm! Version 1 comes with four trays, while version 1.1 boasts eight.