Kees Kamper (alias opqrstu3D) is a 3D designer living in Amsterdam. He won a 3D printer — a Leapfrog Dual Creatr — at the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, however, when he started 3D printing, almost everything went wrong. So he searched the Internet for help but all he found was a big gap.
He thus decided to turn this problem into an opportunity and start filling this gap with a blog about his experience with the Leapfrog Creatr. Apparently in Amsterdam the duality with the Ultimaker – widely considered to be among the best desktop 3D printers in the world – is quite intense.
Kamper discovered that the Creatr has a bit of a bad reputation — a 3D specialist in a shop suggested he should dump it and get an Ultimaker. He did not give up, however, and in the end he was able to “tame his robot”. It took about 5 months and he is sharing his ongoing experience with the global community.
The style of the blog is witty and humorous. Kamper depicts himself as a human designer working and creating with his trusted robot. Every problem and every difficulty the robot faces becomes an opportunity for a new blog entry. And the Creatr is not the only one who is fallible.
In one of his latest entries opqrstu3D 3D printed 53 glow in the dark bracelets with PLA filament. After some issues with filament from uncertain origins, the robot did its share and produced the bracelets which, however, were not particularly successful at the Kingsday vrijmarkt, a huge garage sale in Amsterdam. They only sold four, probably because the glow in the dark effect was invisible in the sunlight.
In the meantime his robot ran into another issue: clogged nozzles. Fortunately he now knows exactly what to do about that: “retract the filament, unscrew the nozzle, put it in nail varnish remover, give it 12 hours and dry it”. The commercial attractiveness of his creations is a more complex issue: he tried to solve it by adding some colourful cut straws. The results seem nice. Future entries will tell how it went.
The point is, there are growing numbers of personal 3D printing stories and they’re not all good. But even when it does go wrong, Kees shows it doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. It’s how you deal with it that matters. And that’s not just a 3D printing lesson, that’s a life lesson for us all.
