One of my favourite presentations at the Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields earlier this year was Lorraine Underwood’s talk on Cubert. Lorraine has a really healthy attitude towards failure in making and how by sharing our failures as well as our successes we can encourage other makers.
Last night I did a seven hour print job on my budget £160 delta printer. It was looking really good until it failed at 90% in the early hours. Obviously I was not really pleased with it and went to bed at 2am in a sulk.
I was printing a model of Lumpy Space Princess from Adventure time and it failed towards the top of her head (if you can describe it as that!)
Rather than throwing it out I decided that this would become a learning opportunity (well after all I am a teacher!). I fired up Meshmixer, found a tutorial and sliced off the top of her head!
I then printed the top of her head and glued it onto the body.
To be honest it isn’t brilliant, my slice was not in the exact right position and the join still needs sanding down to get a good finish.
I love the definition of FAIL as;
- First
- Attempt
- In
- Learning
I know my end product isn’t really that good but that doesn’t matter, what is good is the new skill I have in editing STL files using Meshmixer.
Can I encourage you to show your failures, the ones that didn’t work and all the steps that went wrong – it does encourage!