Vase for a Friend

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The Story

So one of the great things about having a 3d Printer is the ability to tell a friend they can have anything they want for their birthday as long as they can find an STL and it fits on my printer. So she tells me she wants a vase and likes purple. So I hope on to Thingiverse and find this Spiral vase by Streetfire_Industries on Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2421704 and text it to her. She tells me it is beautiful so I know it is a good choice. Some filament is left over so I printed a rose for fun but stretching it out so it was big enough made the stem print fail twice.

Then I went to amazon and found this filament called Protopasta Nebula Multicolor Translucent Transition Glitter Filament. Proto-pasta is my favorite for their color science. The best-looking prints on any of our machines are usually when using Protopasta. After the filament came in I made sure to print a temp tower and went with 205°C on the extruder and 60°C for the bed and recalculated the appropriate flow setting using the calculator I made here.

Post Process

So I messed up in the Cura slicer and left the top layers set to 1.8mm so I printed a cool-looking drum instead of a vase. This was easily fixed by several hours of sanding the top off. (I am hoping I learned my lesson) Then I was going to clear coat it but after looking at how good the print looked straight off the printer I decided only to resin coat the inside for waterproofing since it is a vase. I left the rest of the resin in the bottom of the vase to weigh it down low and make it more stable.

Here are the supplies I used, I mixed 4oz of each part to make the resin and poured the final mixture into the vase rolled it, and used a small brush to spread it near the top. The resin is good for many printed models and lasts a long time.