Rainbow Triple Wrap Bracelet

Rainbow Triple Wrap Bracelet

Rainbow Triple Wrap Bracelet 640 480 mathgrrl

For the last six months I’ve worn this 3D-printed Triple Wrap Bracelet all day and all night, and it’s great:

It’s super flexible when going over your hand, but keeps its shape and fits snugly around your wrist. The version in the photo above was printed on a super-fancy HP Jet Fusion printer at Shapeways, and would be a pretty nasty torture test for any desktop 3D printer.

We decided to put our XYZ da Vinci Color printer to the test! The Shapeways version of the bracelet is way too thin to print on a desktop machine, so we made a slightly thicker version from our OpenSCAD code. The thicker version is the same thing we printed for our previous post Dissolvable Support Interface is Everything You Need. Now, how to add color?

Adding color with Meshmixer

Now, how to color it? It’s easy to color 3D models with the Meshmixer Sculpt tool. To do this, set the top Sculpt selector set to Surface, and set the Brush tool to PaintVertex. Then just select colors and paint around the curve. When you’re done, you can switch your Brush tool to SmoothColor to blend the colors together, if you like:

Screen Shot 2018-03-23 at 1.47.58 PM

Printing on the XYZ Color

Obviously this model needed Raft and Support, so we selected that in the XYZmaker software. We also turned the Infill up to 50% to keep the model strong, and selected Thick Shells since we believe the model gets more saturated color that way. Here’s what the model looked like while printing:

And when finished:

Post-Processing

Most of the supports were easy to remove, but remaining bits of support and rough areas of the print would make the bracelet uncomfortable to wear, so we also sanded things down with a sandpaper file. The finished design held together surprisingly well:

This version of the Triple Wrap Bracelet is a little bit flexible, but it doesn’t open up as wide as the Shapeways-printed version. Be careful not to break it!

 

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