Apologies for the lull in blogging but I’ve been fussing with Autodesk Fusion 360 lately. The current design in 3D printing would be an authentic-looking Knut from the Harry Potter film series.
So for the first coin, I thought I’d try the copper/bronze-looking one since I have some copper-infused PLA filament, some copper-infused artist liquid-stuff and plenty of pennies for electolysis at the end.
I managed to do the front side with a convincing Tratello font for the text and a complete rendering of the details. I will attempt to do a photos->mesh conversion for a better face, however.
Rafting
A raft on the part’s bottom is often necessary so that the part will adhere nicely to the workspace. Unfortunately, that tends to mar up one side of a coin so that approach doesn’t work here. I’ll then want to slice the coin into front/reverse and print both halves.
Weighting
The standard weight of a plastic coin wouldn’t feel right in your hand so the strategy would be to put something inside of two halves to make it seem realistic.
Post-processing
After the actual print, everything you do to make it nice is called post-processing. In this case, this might include assembling the two halves of the coin with glue of some kind, sanding, tumbling in a magnetic rock tumbler device with copper-plated media for a few days, brushed-in application of a copper-infused liquid for touch-ups and finally, wiring and dropping each into an electrolysis chamber so that ionic copper may bind to the outer surface.
Progress
So far, I’ve got one half of the Knut designed and made two test prints. The inside space perfectly matches a penny (which adds weight to the coin and helps to speed up the print time). The filament produces a metallic matte finish and doesn’t appear to have the tell-tale lines you normally might see in a printed part.
The bad news is that my 0.4mm extruder nozzle is too big for this job. I need a tiny opening to print at a higher resolution. So I’ll be ordering some smaller nozzles like this 0.15mm version.
I have a spare power supply from a computer as well as a recycled hard disk. I’ll remove the top from the disk and then glue some very strong magnets around the top perimeter in alternating orientations every 60°. I’ll need to use my existing rubber drum from a rock tumbler kit for the media and parts.
As for the media, this will be a combination of penny-magnet-penny glued sandwiches plus a collection of copper-clad screws (over steel). This then makes everything inside want to give up copper in the millions of collisions with the copper-infused plastic parts, as influenced by the external rotating magnetic field. After a couple of days, the coins should have a healthy amount of superficial copper added plus a polishing of the printed detail.
