3D printing with wood filament is easier than I expected, and the result looks surprisingly similar real wood. Here's a description of my first project with it.
I recently installed a new ceiling fan, a Modern Forms Mykonos fan.
I chose that brand because it has a really straightforward WiFi HTTP protocol that Jim Pastos reverse-engineered. (Thank you Jim!) I figured it'd be easy to integrate with my home automation controller, without the reliability and performance problems that sometimes come with cloud-based integration. Sure enough, the fan's API is very easy to call, so instead of installing the wall switch that comes with the fan, I just programmed my existing keypad to control the fan.
But that left me with the spare wall switch. Although it does include a "hard" switch that can cut power to the fan, its main function is to be a wireless remote control. So I thought that although I don't have a convenient place to install it in the wall, why not build a small enclosure for it and keep it on the nightstand? Mostly, this was an excuse to test the WAF of 3D-printed wood, and it turned out successful — she thinks it's really beautiful. ("Always the tone of surprise.") Here's the finished product:
I knew it needed a slightly more interesting design than just a rectangular box, so I decided to give it a "waist" — a curved indentation around the middle. I've started learning Fusion 360 so that's what I used for modeling. I sketched a bezier shape and offset it by 3mm to make a profile for the wall of the box.
Then I used the sweep tool along a rectangular path to turn that into the body of the enclosure, and joined that with an extruded the rectangle on top. Finally, I cut out the necessary holes: the rectangular opening for the device, two screw holes, and a hole on the side for the power cord. I also cut some slots on the bottom so that it has little "feet" instead of just a flat base.
If you look closely at the inside, you'll see some tiny "ledges" that I added to provide a place to attach a back panel. Unfortunately I didn't model them correctly, so they weren't securely attached. In the end they popped off and weren't of any use.
Anyway, I exported that as an STL file which I dragged to Simplify3D for slicing. I have since learned that it's often recommended to adjust slicing parameters when working with wood filament, but I was blissfully unaware of those considerations so I just used the same settings I've been using for basic PLA. The one tweak I made was to give it a good-sized skirt (8 outlines) because I was wary of it peeling up off the glass bed on the edges.
I used Hatchbox PLA Wood filament — their products seem to be very high quality. The peeling wasn't too bad, but I did encounter the opposite problem: the print was stuck so firmly to the glass bed that I couldn't get it off! After consulting the googles, I came across a good piece of advice: put it in the freezer. So I did that and left it in for a couple hours, and after that sure enough it popped off with very little effort. It's a good trick.
A cool thing about wood filament is that you can sand it, so after extricating it from the printer that's what I did. I used 100-grit paper, then 200, then 300, and finally 600-grit. I wasn't careful to remove all the scratches from the coarser paper though, because I wanted to leave it a little rough. I thought that might make it look a bit "grainy", like real wood.
Also, if you look closely at the corners you can see that it did lift off the bed a little after all. Luckily, I designed it so the faceplate covers the entire top of the enclosure, which means that in the end those imperfections aren't visible.
I then stained it (actually my daughter did), which is when it started looking pretty and wood-like.
Here's a view from the bottom, showing the device installed, along with its power cord.
The finished product in its new home, sitting on the nightstand.
Here's the Fusion model and the STL file. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Happy making!
Questions or comments? Email me at .
2020 Aug 1