{"id":5013,"date":"2025-01-29T17:29:58","date_gmt":"2025-01-30T01:29:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/?p=5013"},"modified":"2025-01-29T17:29:58","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T01:29:58","slug":"drawing-with-plastic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/2025\/01\/29\/drawing-with-plastic\/","title":{"rendered":"Drawing with Plastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in April I had some time to kill during a long freelance project where I was spending a ton of time in Illustrator. Inspired by some vintage car dealer badges I’d seen, I designed one of my own<\/a> as a flat file in Illustrator, and started looking in to how to build it out as a file that could be read by a 3D printer. While I can’t make complex shapes with this software, I was able to get it 95% of the way there.<\/p>\n

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The original design<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our local library finally reopened this summer but they haven’t re-started their 3D printing service. The only two branches to offer it are a 20 minute drive away north of the city. It’s now set up as a self-serve option, so you have to get certified to use the printer. I set up an appointment to do this on a day Finn was off from school, and the three of us drove up there this morning.<\/p>\n

We sat through the quick tutorial, took a test, and were certified within about 20 minutes. While the librarian showed us the system, she asked if we had anything we wanted to print, and I broke out my file. She used that to set things up and we watched it start printing as we finished our course.<\/p>\n

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Printing in progress<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At first, it looked really stringy and weird like somebody was laying out thin strands of bubblegum on a flat plate, but as it started stacking up layers, the letterforms solidified to the point where when it finished, it was almost as clear as the file I built. Overall, it took about 40 minutes to print and while that was happening, I took care of work related stuff while the girls read. I’m really very pleased with the outcome here. This looks very close to what I had in my head when I designed it and I think there are only a few tweaks I would make to this piece before printing two more out: one for the Scout and one for Darth.<\/p>\n

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Looks pretty good!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in April I had some time to kill during a long freelance project where I was spending a ton of time in Illustrator. Inspired by some vintage car dealer badges I’d seen, I designed one of my own as a flat file in Illustrator, and started looking in to how to build it out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-inspiration"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58Ac2-1iR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5017,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013\/revisions\/5017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billdugan.com\/scout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}