Swimming Challenge Coin

Last crawled date: 4 years, 2 months ago

To make this challenge coin there are several skills that may be incorporated. To start, we used digital calipers to measure the diameter and features of a government issued challenge coin. (The actual printer part was upsized slightly)
A blank coin was then created in Tinkercad. The same was also created in Fusion360 to compare the pros/cons of each on the same basic part.
For the circular text, Inkscape was used. Skills learned were how to apply text to a selected path and effectively convert the text image to a SVG file buy converting the Object to Path.
The SVG was then imported into Tinkercad and Fusion360 respectively for comparison. Tinkcad was used to make the final design.
The file was exported from Tinkercad and brought into Cura. Within Cura, a script was added to pause the height at 14 layers. At layer 14 the print would pause, the X & Y moved to 20:20 and PLA was retracted 25mm at 50mm/s and the nozzle temp was set to standby at 25 degrees C. This allows for the changing of filament from purple to yellow. Once the print is enabled again, the nozzle reheats (set at 205). Watching the temperature, as soon as the nozzle reached 185 the PLA was manually fed to purge the excess purple from the nozzle.
The print shown needs further refinement. The text needs atleast two more layers to adequately "pop" off the print. The build plate was also bumped off level during the filament change. The next rendition will have modified cura setting to start the second color at layer 13 (and repeat layer 13) to hopefully fix the lettering. I will also keep my bear paw hands off the build plate during the filament color swap to ensure it stays level. :-)