For our OpenSCAD project, we decided to really play to the advantages of using OpenSCAD and decided to create a Hyperboloid, aka the shape of the cooling towers that you see at nuclear power plants. We used a for-loop to have the rectangular rods go around the base of the structure, each at an angle. At first glance, the rods look like they may be curved, however, each of the rods is completely straight. We decided to print the top base separate from the rest of the structure to avoid messing with the supports that would’ve been printed along with it. After printing the top base, we went ahead and hot-glued it to the top. A couple problems that we ran into while designing and printing it out is that about halfway through printing the design, the rectangular rods would mess up and would either completely break off the rest of the structure already printed, or it would look very messy. We attempted to fix this by having less rods so that the nozzle wouldn’t accidentally hit it, which we thought was the problem.
This is the code that we produced into order to make the Hyperboloid.
module grid (a) {
union() {
for (i = [0:30]) {
rotate([0,0,15*i])
rotate(a, v=[1,0,1])
translate([10,0,0]) {
cube([1,1,100],true);
}
}
}
}
grid (25);
rotate ([0,0,90]) {
grid (25);
}
/*translate([0,0,48])
difference() {
cylinder(2,20,20,true);
cylinder(1,19,19,true);
}
*/
translate([0,0,-47])
cylinder(2,20.5,20.5,true);
translate([0,0,48])
cylinder(2,18.5,18.5,true);
super glued top base to the rest of structure
some examples of the messed-up rectangular rods towards the end of the print.
printing the slightly modified design with less rectangular rods
UPDATE 11/28/2018
Deciding to reprint the model at a larger scale while having it go a little slower to avoid the problems with the rectangular rods messing up halfway through due to the printer shaking and causing problems. So I left it before leaving for Thanksgiving break with 19 hours on the printer.
Coming back however…
So i’m not sure exactly what went wrong with this, but obviously something did. We decided to try one more time to see if we can get it.
UPDATE: 12/10/2018
The code was altered so that there’s a support in the middle of the structure and it printed perfectly!
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