So bean prototype number 2 was a bit of a bust. The bean printed way too small, and the support material was impossible to remove from the center. We THINK we got the final product ready to rock though! We redid the cad model, again, making it a little bigger, and rounding it a bit more. Thankfully it’s a simple enough design that this process isn’t super tedious. With a new filament in hand, I marched on over to the FabLab to put an end to it all.

The new filament was a super-cool flexible filament known as Filaflex, by Recreus, a company out of Spain. The diameter of the filament was too thick for the Makerbots, so this was a job for the FabLab team. I brought it in, and we did our research. We had to download the proper settings for it, and we spent forever figuring out perfect extrusion temperature, how to make it work, the best way to orient the figure, and then we pressed the big “PRINT” button, and waited. Problem, it didn’t stick to the bed. By that point, the lab was closing and we had to reconvene the next day.

Upon reconvening, they had broken the glass bed with a different print in the day and the glass they replaced it with was just too big. We made it work and got it leveled, struggled with the extrusion temperatures, and again, the lab closed. I promise I wasn’t going last minute, this process just ended up being super lengthy. In the end, we couldn’t make the filament work in time for Tuesday’s class. I’m heading back today to continue the battle and hopefully, we’ll have a squishier version of the gripping bean that works!