Monthly Archives: June 2013

3D Printed Cookie Cutters

A while back a friend of mine was talking about her baking job. Turns out that there are uses for 3D Printing in baking: cookie cutters

I found a quick method to printing cookie cutters. I like this method because it shows the power of using a configurable slicing engine.

I started with a logo, a rough shape of a bakers head. In sketchup you can import images to then model on top of. I traced the head, gave it some thickness and exported the .stl. I now had a model that was basically the shape of the cookie I wanted.

Making it into a cookie cutter meant changing some settings. In Slic3r, the settings were changed to:

Infill: 0
Top layers:  0
Bottom layers: 0
Perimeters: 3

What this leaves you with is just the few shells of perimeters, leaving you a perfect cookie cutter.

There are many designs for cookie cutters on Thingiverse. Try printing a few out. Eat some cookies, they are great after a long day of printing.

Here are some that I printed out.

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3D Printed Disk Sander

I’ve recently been working on a project that involves many laser cut parts that for some reason weren’t fitting very well. I was spending too much time sanding things down by hand and decided to do something about it. I printed out a disk sander attachment for my drill.

The disk sander uses a bolt as the shaft that you clamp your drill too. The bolt I used was 6/32 machine screw about 2.5 inches long. Its set through the center of the sanding disk. The head of the bolt is recessed into the disk so that the sanding plane is smooth.

Attaching the sand paper only needs a little bit of Elmers Glue-All. Just cut a disk of sand paper as close as you can get to the size of the disk.

The printer settings I used were:

  • Layer Height: .4mm
  • Infill: .4
  • Perimeters: 3
  • Top and bottom layers : 4

These settings gave me a pretty strong print which let it stand up to the drill quite well. Good luck sanding for yourself. Let me know how this worked out for you