Voronoi toothbrush holder

prusaprinters

<p>Goal was to a) experiment with the Voronoi style of 3D modeling and b) create a toothbrush holder that would actually come clean.</p> <p>I've marked it as a "work in progress" not because I plan to develop it further but because...</p> <ul> <li>the model files are too short; I scaled it in the Z axis in the slicer to about 110mm, near the limit of my Monoprice Select Mini</li> <li>if you have toothbrushes with very wide handles/grips, you may need to enlarge the holes</li> <li>The file names made sense at the time but might not now. See design notes</li> </ul> <h3>Print Settings</h3> <p><strong>Printer:</strong></p> <p>Monoprice Select Mini</p> <p><strong>Rafts:</strong></p> <p>Yes</p> <p><strong>Supports:</strong></p> <p>Yes</p> <p><strong>Resolution:</strong></p> <p>.0875</p> <p><strong>Infill:</strong></p> <p>n.a.</p> <p><strong>Notes:</strong></p> <h3>Scale Z axis non-unformly to 110mm or so!</h3> <p>Never really got the raft and supports fully cleaned up. Now that I have a different printer that does bridging better, I might try not using supports and the raft, but I don't need two toothbrush holders,</p> <p>0.0875mm layer height was crazy overkill. Go with your default.</p> <h3>Post-Printing</h3> <p><strong>Enlarging holes</strong></p> <p>I was able to enlarge the top-center hole a little by softening that area with a heat gun and wiggling a dowel around the inside pushing out as it cooled.</p> <h3>How I Designed This</h3> <p><strong>FreeCAD: Basic form</strong></p> <p>If you redo this, consider making the height at least 2/3, maybe 3/4 of the length of your toothbrush handles. The current design is too short and must be printed with a scaled Z axis or it will be unbalanced. (Actually, the vertical elongation of the Voronoi pattern is not a bad look.)</p> <p>I exported this form as a solid mesh, this is the "Toothbrush holder solid (Meshed).stl" file</p> <p>(I also reexported as .obj from MeshMixer)</p> <p><strong>MeshMixer: Hollow out, reduce, cut holes, Voronoi</strong></p> <p>In Meshmixer, I imported the solid and hollowed it to 2mm. I'd been trying to go narrower, but the mesh broke too easily.</p> <p>Then, using the select/edit/reduce dialog in Meshmixer reduce the number of polygones. Fewer polygons gives larger Voronoi shapes but increases the chances of breaking the mesh and making it unprintable. Be creative, and read/watch any of the many Voronoi modeling tutorials out there.</p> <p>To make the holes in the top, I created three cylinders (given here as "Holes.stl"), positioned them above the indented base, and did a Boolean cut.</p> <p>The final Meshmixer step -- after inspecting the mesh for defects and repairing -- is to edit/make pattern/dual edges. Again, please refer to tutorials online (I've only done this once and would not be a good instructor in this technique).</p> <p>The file I exported after this is available here as "Toothbrush holder voronoi pattern 2mm.stl" (it's rather large, 86MB)</p> <p><strong>Scale, slice, print</strong></p> <p>After placing the .stl in Cura, I selected the object and scaled it in the Z axis only (turn off the Uniform Scaling checkbox) to 110mm high.</p> <p>I printed it with a layer eight of only 0.0875, and gave it a raft. Took the Monoprice Select Mini v1 about 38 hours. (I got nervous when a thunderstorm came through... knowing it was going to take so long, I'd moved it to the garage, without its usual UPS)</p> Category: Bathroom