After months of testing, running demos, rebuilding parts and printing trinkets, Mork the reprap has finally been put to use to create a useful part to replace an item. Viv had a shower shelf which normally has two mounting brackets. However one was lost, so he needed to create a replacement bracket, or throw the entire item away. He arrived at the TechSpace with the bracket he wanted to clone, and being somewhat proficient with the Blender 3D design software, he had the part designed within an hour. The design was then fed through the applications that we use:
- slicer to convert the design into the appropriate “gcode” for Mork, and
- into the “pronterface” 3d printing software,
and soon he had his cloned part in green PLA, as shown. If you look closely, you will see that the cloned part is not actually identical to the original. However it was designed in as short a time as possible to replicated the original in function, not form. Since the part will be almost invisible when mounted on the wall, the choice of colour was not important either, so he used whatever was available at the Space at the time.