Saturday, May 25, 2013

Spiral 002



Here's what that 8mm film developing spiral might look like.. .should somebody try to CAD model it in Geomagic Design...

I'm currently trialling this software and making some progress with it... The most basic version of this software is called Geomagic Design (Personal Edition), and I'm thinking this is a pretty good tool for this kind of work, and certainly a whole lot better than the Autodesk 123D Design (free) application I've been using so far.

This model is the lower half of the film spiral only. There will need to be a top plate to keep the film held in place, but that part will be of a much simpler design.

I uploaded this as an .stl file to Shapeways.com, the estimated price to make this part would be about £80. Just at the moment this seems a little bit too much to spend on this project, so I'm hoping to find a service / 3D printer owner who could help me make this for a little less.

2 comments:

HaiZ said...

Hi Chris, it's inspiring to saw your work of a diy develop spiral, I'm thinking make one for myself, but cannot find the project you uploaded to shapeways, actually what I'm planning is to make a 100ft 16mm spiral so I don't need to cut the whole roll into two, which is happening for a lomo tank. Could you please send me a link of your uploaded project or may I ask for the .stl file?

chrisgavin said...

Hi HaiZ,

Many thanks for finding and responding to this (very old) post of mine.
I sketched this in some free 3D software back then; but when I realised it would cost a fortune to order as a 3D print, I gave up on this approach. So I never did get this 3D printed and can't say if it would work well or not. My guess is that one would have to iterate the design and making process a few times to get this right. It could be worthwhile for someone with their own 3D pinter (and some determination) but not very viable as a Shapeways option in terms of costing. Also if sel-printing this, one would need a pretty big build area, larger than most of the low-end affordable printers allow.

So I went down another route and created a spiral by bending flat aluminium wire. This I actually built, and used a few times! If you've not seen my post about this, it's here...
http://www.chrisgavin.com/2013/07/diy-spiral-proccessing-tank-for-cine.html

So maybe the 3D printing route is worth pursuing if you have access to a large format 3D printer, but probably not if you're using a 3D print service. I would really have to dig to find my old 3D file for this, as it's not on my PC anymore. Hopefully I archived the data away somewhere, but I doubt I'll have time to dig for it, as I'm pretty busy most of the time with other work/life things these days!

Best Wishes,
Chris