Ultimaker Experiments

Model: Ultimaker Original +

This instructable highlights tricks and hacks that can be done with this versatile and user friendly 3d printer. The design used was a bracelet designed by Joris Van Tubergen ( http://www.rooiejoris.nl)

Step 1: The Tool

Ulitmaker original +

PLA Filament

I found that 'live adjustments' capability of ultimaker is the best in the market. Material Volume, Bed height, printing speed, multiple filament, thin air printing..you can play with a lot of options and the outcome depends on each of the changes. This opens a lot of doors for your creative interpretations.

Step 2: The Design

The bracelet design can be downloaded here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:8488

Step 3: Experimenting With Volume and Bed Hieght

Increasing the volume of the extruding filament has a huge impact on the texture of the finished object. As it can be seen low volume makes it very compact and each layer rests nicely over the previous one. However once I started increasing the volume, the successive layers were not that precise and started to fall of the edge. The result is rather an interesting outcome which cannot be visualized or designed in any CAD software.

Step 4: Experimenting With Bed Height

After a few couple of layers, I started to increase the bed height and then brought it back to the original value after couple of layers. I repeated this over and over until this form was formed. Once a wavy base structure is generated we can keep it at a fixed bed height value and it keeps the form. Again, these kind of designs can be quite hard to realize in CAD software but live adjustments allows us to do that. This technique can also be used to print in thin air with some pivot points.

Step 5: Multiple Color

This is a simple yet efficient technique that can be realized by Ultimaker. We can cut the filament during printing and before it runs out, we can feed a different filament. So with the same design and print time we can have different layers with different properties.