Pinning the top of Mary’s latest quilt used more than 1600 pins: three boxes of specialized quilting safety pins, plus straight quilting pins tucked into all the 3D printed / silicone filled caps. Less than a quarter of the quilt top fits on the table:
Although Mary doesn’t need them right now, I made another batch of 100 caps for her next project:
I tweaked the OpenSCAD source to build a 10×10 array:
But it turns out that a 5×5 array of caps, duplicated four times, works out better:
Slic3r takes far longer to process the larger array than to make four copies of the smaller array.
Half an hour later, they’re ready for silicone fill. In retrospect, natural PLA wasn’t a good choice for this job: there’s no way (for me) to take a picture of translucent silicone in crystalline PLA atop waxed paper on a white cutting board under fluorescent light…
On the upside, however, you can see exactly how far the pin goes into the cap:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 