Maker Faire 2014: Adam Savage’s 10 Commandments of Making
“Anything that you need to make”
EJ sent me this link a few days after my first print. I guess my start was good. I made a trash can hinge becauseI really NEEDED.
I made a replacement piece for our tall kitchen trash bin hinge that had been broken for 2 weeks. Rusted screws stuck and broke in screw hole on the plastic hinge so I’ve been epoxy glueing the plastic piece directly to the metal lid. Probably I’ve had this bin for 8yrs and fixing the hinge every 2 yrs or so. I just hate to toss the rest of a perfectly working condition metal bin. I know I could solve this problem for $50 at Target by just getting a brand new one in 30 mins.
Of course I like to be challenged. So here we go. I gave myself a condition that if I couldn’t solve it by midnight (I kinda decided to do this @4pm) I would go to Target and get a brand new trash bin.
First lesson, measuring the functional piece with a desk ruler was… ah… challenging. I placed an order for a digital caliper on Amazon, be here next week. Well… the challenge must go on… 3D modeling the piece where functionally I care but not adding details on outside shape (midnight deadline!) First time using the Autodesk’s MeshMixer for scaling check and for converting it to hi-res mesh. Then onto Cura. Selected the lowest print pre-set so I could start printing in shortest time.
90 mins cooking (=printing) and first piece came out! Oh… I leaned that plastic shrinks… PLA was actually a very strong plastic compared to the original plastic hinge which I could stretch edges to widen to fit to the bottom potion of the foot press mechanism. At 9pm I went back to my original mesh and gave 2mm extra width. Export to MeshMixer -> Cura -> printer.
90 mins later, few minutes to spare before midnight… Voilà! Adam Salvage is right. Every time I step on the foot pedal to open the trash bin, I hear my heart saying “I made this” 🙂
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