Design

Wedding Cake Topper Design – Using Wood PLA

As mentioned in the previous entry, a colleague of mine asked me to create a cake topper for her daughter’s upcoming wedding.

She initially started working on the design using her Cricut Maker. She very quickly realized that medium wasn’t going to be appropriate for her project. Knowing that I have a 3D printer, and knowing that I can do some basic design work, she decided that having the object 3D printed would add more strength and durability to the part. Also, depending on the filament she chose, would open up more options for finishing the product.

We settled on working with a wood PLA filament. Specifically, Form Futura – Cedar – Purchased from Filaments.ca

What’s super cool about working with a wood based PLA is that the final product can be treated and finished like real wood. It can be sanded and stained to create a really unique finish to a 3D printed product.

The finished design in TinkerCad
The finished print – The process made some interesting designs in the top layer level. When it is sanded and stained it will look very unique!

It’s a really great accomplishment when you can take someone’s concept and bring it to life in a unique and creative way using 3D printing and design.

Totally Creawesome Dude!

As a beginning 3D printer things can be overwhelming. That’s why Eric Ptak over on GitHub created the Creawesome modification for Cura 4.0

There are so many settings that can be adjusted in your slicer of choice.

I use Cura 4.0 and there are settings that will be valuable to learn right away, such as:

  • Infill – The percentage amount that will be filled inside of the object
  • Adhesion – Raft, brim, skirt or naked – if you dare. Get that print to stick to your print bed on the all important first layer.
  • Supports – Make sure your tricky prints don’t fail by adding extra material that can easily be removed.

Of course you’ll find a host of other, and much more advanced settings, that you’ll eventually venture out on and tweak until your prints are to your liking.

If you use an Ender 3, like me, you just might want to try out the Creawesome Modification. It changes key settings that are tried and true for Creality printers. Along with many surface settings, it also changes some settings that beginner users would never touch.

All in, many users, including myself are reporting much improved print quality over their pesronal slicer settings.

Not to mention, it updates Cura with this sweet model of your Creality printer

Hit this link for a direct downlad. Installation is easy:

  • Unzip the Creawesome package.
  • Backup your Cura resources file – In your Ultimaker Cura directory, simply rename your resources file to “resources_old”
  • Copy the Creawesome resources folder to your Ultimaker Cura directory.

If you don’t notice a difference, maybe your original Cura settings were tuned to perfection. Simply delete the Creawesome resources folder and remove “_old” from your resource folder to get back to your initial settings.

Keep an eye here as I will update the blog frequently with Creawesome Mod results.