Hey, so I thought I'd update you and anyone else interested.
I was able to get the cryocan 3D printed in time for halloween. I chose to print it with black printing filament, to be spray painted chrome to look metallic.
Here are the pieces fresh from the printer:
Those pieces just cleanly popped off of that base layer. The only piece that needed a lot of extraneous plastic removed was the right-most piece in the above picture. All of the grooves on the "unscrewable" base were loosely filled with extraneous filament. I was able to knock it all out of there with my finger nails or a screw driver. Once I knocked all that stuff out, it looked like the proper piece.
My first mistake here was my next step: I chose to spray paint the pieces before assembling them.
Looks great! But... after it dried enough to handle it, I realized that the paint made the pieces too thick to fit together properly, so I had to sand them down quite a bit. Needless to say, the very top-most surface of the paint might have been dry, but the depth of the paint wasn't, so the sanding process got quite messy and grimy. It really took the sheen off of the pieces, but I had to get the thing assembled in time for halloween, so on I went. Next time I'll either assemble it first and THEN spray paint the whole thing, or try to tape up the inner parts of the pieces that are supposed to fit together so that the spray paint doesn't get applied to those areas, and so they'll still fit together when assembled later.
Here's what the final product ended up looking like. Like I said, it got a bit grimy-looking in the assembly process because of my inexperience with paint and all of that, but this was fine enough for my purposes. Obviously, the microcentrifuge tubes aren't screen-accurate. I couldn't get the screw-cap ones in a small enough batch (I didn't want to have 500 or 1000 of them just sitting around) and actually I didn't even receive these snap-cap ones in time for halloween, but that was OK. No big deal. Because of my botched assembly, my cryocan lacks the twist-and-pop-up action element to it. It does have a spring in there, so if the thing is pressed down, it'll go down and pop up, but it won't stay down by itself, and it doesn't twist and pop up. That's also OK. I'll probably print it again at some point and try to make it more perfect looking and functional. For what it's worth, although all my pics show the inner mechanism outside of the Barbasol can, it DOES successfully fit perfectly inside the Barbasol can.
Here's my whole costume. It was a lot of fun to put this costume together - the stickers on the jacket and the cryocan and the Nedry ID tag and all of it. This pic was taken immediately after I arrived at the party, and right after this I went and applied some black splotchy halloween makeup to my face for the Dilophosaurus spit. No pix of that, unfortunately. I gave it some thought, but decided I wasn't dedicated enough to shave my beard to really complete the costume. Oh well! Anyway, the costume got a ton of great comments from friends and strangers alike, and my friend entered me in the bar's costume contest without my knowledge. I ended up getting called up there a few times to show everything off to the judges and eventually I won the "most creative" category for a prize of some Beats by Dre Beats Solo 2 headphones. I'm a headphone enthusiast so the Beats won't do me any good, so I'll just sell them, but that's a $120+ prize, so that's pretty cool. I thank you, Lael, of course, for providing these 3D files freely for others to use. Clearly I couldn't have accomplished it without your help.
A couple weeks after halloween, the 3D printing lab at the university library had their "open house" and I stopped by there to check it out and show off my 3D printed item. They all thought it was cool and took some pix of it to post to their website (I presume).
I saw this 3D printed t-rex skull and had to get a pic of the cryocan next to it. Too nice a match.
Anyway, that's all I got. Thanks again Lael for providing the 3D files. This has been a really fun project for me, and I'll probably give it another go some time to make it that bit more screen-accurate.
If anyone has any questions or comments for
me, lemme know!
