For my final project I knew from the start that it would be 3D printed. While I initially wished for it to be made out of metal, I knew that I wouldn’t have the dimensional accuracy to be satisfied. I had small gear teeth and if the dimensions were off by even a little, then I would observe a massive increase in friction. I experienced that the hard way when I tried resin printing. This additive manufacturing method is wet. If it isn’t correctly set up, then the teeth would droop as the material stiffened. Like I said earlier, any discrepancies from my design would cause extra friction and that’s exactly what I experienced. I learned at this moment that the material was also extremely brittle because I saw the teeth were cracking and chipping from the interaction.

This led me to changing my manufacturing process. I considered PLA, but the resolution of the additive manufacturing method was a little too poor for my gear teeth so I went with the carbon powder that the MarkedForge was capable of printing. It allowed for the precise resolution I desired, and was a stronger material which was great. The only problem was the price. The resulting petals looked like this:

I had also added some speckles to the back of the petals so that they looked more like a galaxy. Regardless, with a new rack gear and these petals I was able to tie it all together, literally, with a string.