Project Blog

I’ve played around with printing multiple colors using a single extruder, but by and large all the multi-color action was restricted to a single layer. There’s a good reason for this: every color change takes time, and having 2 or more colors run throughout the part would require a color change ON EVERY LAYER.

But I had to try. I had a great idea: a fairly understated bottle opener with different color text embedded on each side. To the uninitiated it’s a neat little thing, but to people who know 3D printing its a: “wait, what? how did you do that?”

Well, here’s “how I did that.” It took a LOT of time. I didn’t call it “The Saturday Killer” for nothing.
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I’ve been making bottle openers for friends, and I recently struck upon the perfect design for my friend Matt. For some reason, he still pines for a hockey team that left our home state in 1997 (THEN won the Stanley Cup.) His opener got a Whalers Logo:

Up to this point, all my openers have been single color. But combine the fact that I’m jealous of the new dual extruder with the fact that Matt was my Best Man, and I decided that this time I would go the extra mile.

The procedure was straight-forward, and a huge pain in the butt:

• First I printed a blank opener in the base color
• Then I adjusted the Z-Height of the Thingomatic by 5.76mm (the height of the opener base)
• When I switched the color to blue and printed the tail, the printer deposited the plastic on the white base as if it were the build platform
• After switching colors AGAIN, I printed the W and the opener was done

This was a fairly simple multi-color design, but by breaking up the model ahead of time, this technique could be used for any part.

I recently posted an improved bottle opener design to Thingiverse. Unlike the mighty bottle opener, this is one that I’m proud to give out, and people are happy to receive.

Because I did the model in OpenSCAD, it turns out to be really easy to create personal, one-of-a-kind gifts for my friends. In this post I’ll go through the steps I took to make an opener for my friend deWit. He skis, and he’s pretty good:

Ok, maybe he’s really good. Anyway, this has been my favorite skiing picture since it was taken a few years back. I thought it might be nice to capture some of this awesomeness in opener form.
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