[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]

November 30th, 2019-

Hello dear Patrons! November has been a very productive month! Here's what happened:

First, I successfully printed my most complex part ever with the trash printer- a 12" tall mushroom lamp. I found the model on Thingiverse, and wanted to see if I could get it to print on the Trash Printer. The biggest challenge was that most of my prints to date have been "spiral vase" style prints, which means that the extruder just moves in a continuous spiral for the entire print.

Spiral vase prints are fast and easy, but if ALL you can print with a printer is spiral vase parts, it limits the usefulness significantly. Since the trash printer extruder oozes a lot, stopping it and moving it can cause problems. I dialed in the settings in the software, so that it would give "extra length on restart", so that it would pause and feed extra material after a move, and that worked pretty well! I still had to watch it pretty closely, but it worked and thats a really good sign!

Next, I printed out all the parts I need to build an entirely new Trash Printer from scratch, so that I can record a full, step by step tutorial video. I uses this awesome sparkly purple filament we got from Proto Pasta at Maker Faire.

Now I'm just waiting on some pulleys and lead screws to arrive, and I can film the whole build one go. Look for that video by the end of December!

Finally, Claire and I collaborated to make these awesome jewelry bits out of recycled PLA! We got a few sheets of recycled PLA that our friends from the Trash Hackers Collective had made from failed 3D prints and defective filament, and we used the t-shirt heat press I bought a few months ago (with your generous support) to press diffraction film onto the sheet.

Diffraction film is made from PET plastic and has a much higher melting point than PLA. The film has tiny microscopic ridges on it that give it that rainbow effect, and when you heat-press the film onto the PLA sheet at around 400F, the PLA melts, but the PET doesn't, and the PLA makes a mold of the ridges on the film and becomes diffractive as well! The film is not destroyed in this process and you can just rainbow-ify recycled plastic over and over using only heat and pressure.

Neat! And it turns out you can do this with Polypropylene as well! This makes it really easy to press shredded trash into rainbow laser-cuttable sheets, and then cut those sheets into any shape you want.

Finally, I've decided to raffle off this mushroom lamp to one of my randomly-selected Patrons at the end of December! If you're already a patron, you're already in the running, and if you're not, you can enter by becoming a patron for any amount before December 31st!

See y'all next year!

Sam