Entoforms at the lab
I've been working on my Entoforms since January... They are 3D printed creatures, grown in the computer, and presented as insects...
To present them I'm pinning them in boxes just like Entomologists do with butterflies for instance. But then... I need to drive a pin through the print, and that's not so easy. I first need to drill a hole... and that hole should be exactly the same size as the pin, which is only 0.5mm
That's not a standard drill size at all... And it took me a while to find a company who could supply them... I went ahead and bought 10... but then found out that the 3D print material is so hard, you can't really drill it by hand with such a tiny drill. Then I went on-line to buy a small electric drill (a rather cheap one), only to find out later that even the tiny drill couldn't take bits smaller than 1.0mm.
Now this is why I'm so happy there's a Fablab here in Amsterdam. They have a drill that can take such tiny tiny bits... So I went to test, and figure out whether it's worth it for me to invest in a more expensive drill myself.
The result
And... the end result... turns out that either my hand is not steady enough, or the drill bits are too flexible to be practical. Only when drilling through quite thin parts is it possible to put a pin through the hole at all. In thicker models the drill bends a tiny bit making it impossible to use a pin. The grooves in the drill bit also gunk up with molten plastic.
The conclusion has to be that I should drill slightly larger holes, and use glue to hold the pin in place. Not as "neat" a solution, but much more practical... And... turns out that it was incredibly useful to test this out at the Fablab... It saved me the cost of buying a more expensive drill, just to see whether it would work!
See http://www.entoforms.com for more information about my project if you're interested.
Thanks!
Dolf (macouno)
