The New Hotness

Each of the glass fragments in a 3D printed coaster sits atop a metallized paper reflector in its own recess and gets covered with epoxy:

That’s an early printed coaster with the epoxy pool covering the entire surface. Putting a rim around each fragment to form separate pools works better.

Assuming I do a tidy job of filling the recesses, this process worked exactly as you’d expect until I printed a coaster with blue PETG-CF filament:

Other than a slightly ragged cork layer motivating me to make the cork slightly smaller and use a fixture to align it properly, the coaster looks reasonably good. However, a close inspection shows all the epoxy pools are slightly recessed below their rims.

It turns out printing PETG-CF with an extrusion multiplier of 0.8, which I figured based on fitting threaded parts together, doesn’t fuse the threads into an epoxy-tight surface:

Fortunately, I’d been working on a silicone mat that could take a joke. I managed to move the coaster to a plastic sheet and refill the drained pools, although they continued to drain while curing.

After the epoxy cured to a rubbery texture, I scraped off the meniscus around the perimeter of the coaster, but the bottom shows it cured in a pool of its own making:

The cork conceals the evidence and the result looks good enough for my simple needs:

Memo to self: Use the correct filament preset for the job!