 |
| Left an early trial 3D print in clay (unfired) , right, a plastic 'raft' printed by 3D printer |
The blogging mojo
has been absent in the past couple of weeks due to plain busyness, and yet, of
course, so much has been going on in my world.
For one thing teaching at CIT ceramics department has been a wonderful
challenge and I am loving being part of the place. The students are a great bunch and often
surprise themselves when they dredge up a previously unknown resourcefulness or
ability to put into their clay work. I
loaded a kiln last week full of their handmade teapots and boxes, we are moving
onto Wall Art now and making simple drop moulds to replicate their forms with.
Meanwhile Graham
Hay continues with his residency at CIT and tweaks and twiddles with the 3D
printer CIT recently purchased. It came
in kit form and took a while to build. I imagine a ready made one would have
cost a lot more given how many man hours went into building it. The 3D printer was designed to print with a
low temperature meltable plastic, this is fed into the printer from what looks
like a roll of cable – but the cable is in fact the plastic consumable it prints
with.
In normal parlance
the concept of printing entails the laying down of an ‘ink’ of some kind onto a
flat substrate – usually paper. The ink
sits on the substrate and dries whether it is a screen print or an inkjet or
laserjet of text or images. Sometimes an
ink or paint is printed where we can see and feel the change in surface where
the ink sits upon the surface.
In the case of 3D
we are printing but layer upon layer and building upwards from the horizontal
plane into a 3D form instead of across a flat 2D surface.
There were weeks
of calibrating our 3D printer and once that was done the hard part now starts. Now the development of a suitable clay body
is underway, one that will pipe through the printer under gentle hydraulic
pressure – there is a large pressurised air pump attached. So as well as the 3D printer a source of compressed air plus a computer are required to make anything happen. The printed/extruded/piped clay mustn’t be too
liquid or it will flop and flow, but must be soft enough to extrude and sit
upon itself to build up layer upon layer to create a 3D form.
I am assuming that
you dear reader are smart enough to ‘get it’ if I threw in some hi tech
terminology, I am putting this all into my own ‘laymans terms’ to try to
explain it.
So the printed
clay, think of a coil pot but the printer is placing the mini ‘coils’, has to
hold itself up and take weight while the printer head moves around the form laying
down the clay – as directed by the computer.
Personally I find this whole subject completely fascinating. I love modern technology and materials and I
literally lie in bed at night thinking of what the printer might make and what
might make the perfect clay composition to work best.
Here is a short clip of me asking Graham about the printer.
There have been
lots of trials and observations of the result of each tweak and change. Graham lays out the tangible evidence of each
test print in sequence on the long table at his station in the ceramics area to
be handled and noted, prompting enthusiastic interest and discussion.
More – as it happens!
Now, although I
have missed the Mud Colony deadline – let’s hop over there anyhow and see what
the other clay bloggers have been doing.
