Tuesday 13 October 2015

Let's get rolling! CAD design of custom embossed rolling pins.

From time to time my close friends and family (and clients, contacts, pretty much anyone) give me great ideas for items that would lend themselves to 3D printing. Being able to design and make stuff is only a part of the process - coming up with real-life uses for my design skills and 3D printing ability are often limited to things that I am interested in. 3D printer upgrades, robotic claws and house-hold objects which I will use myself to name a few.

Recently my brother saw a batch of cookies which had been embossed with a special rolling pin, The design was a skull image which was laser-etched into a plain-old rolling pin. This would leave a sheet of dough behind with the skulls embossed, ready to be cut with a plain-old cookie cutter, baked in a plain-old oven and presto! Cookies with little skulls all over them!

A short discussion followed with some of my female family members who were interested in having custom-made cookie rollers themselves, so I decided to take it on as a bit of a love project.


Using Autodesk Inventor as my software of choice, I initially came up with a basic shape for the roller. It would resemble a traditional rolling pin but to make it easy and cheap to manufacture I decided to use a piece of wooden dowel as the 'handle', that way I just needed to print a cylinder with a hole through it to put the dowel in and some embossing on the outer diameter.



I sat back and admired my work - first time I'd tried embossing a cylindrical surface with a continuous pattern. It turned out pretty good! I showed them and they liked it too. Great!

But while the artist in me (note: there isn't one) was happy, the engineer wasn't. I ran this model through my 3D printers 'slicing' software and found that it would take a whopping 13 hours and about a third of a roll of plastic to print it. They would be quite expensive to make, and if the girls wanted a few designs there would be a few rolls of plastic and many days of printing.

So I developed...

Sleeves!




The idea here is that I could print a central hub for them ONCE and then print much thinner 'sleeves' which would slip on over the central hub. The cost for a single design would be a little more than the solid roller, but once they had a second design in mind the cost came down significantly. Each sleeve would only use about one tenth of a roll of plastic. Great!

Add some handles for the ends of the dowel and we had a finished product! Here are the first two designs they requested, love hearts and paw prints.


6 comments:

  1. This is an absolutely awesome idea. Did you happen to make these models available publicly somewhere?

    My daughter found a stamped rolling pin that she wants for Christmas on Etsy, but it costs close to $50 which seems unreasonable. My partner found your site while searching around for a cheaper alternative. I'd love to be able to print something like this for 1/4 the cost, and have expandability for the future, but there's no way I could model it myself.

    If you do make it available, I'd love to see a follow up tutorial on making the sleeves. I wouldn't mind trying to do a few custom patterns too if I can get a few hours in before the holidays.

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is an absolutely awesome idea. Did you happen to make these models available publicly somewhere?

    My daughter found a stamped rolling pin that she wants for Christmas on Etsy, but it costs close to $50 which seems unreasonable. My partner found your site while searching around for a cheaper alternative. I'd love to be able to print something like this for 1/4 the cost, and have expandability for the future, but there's no way I could model it myself.

    If you do make it available, I'd love to see a follow up tutorial on making the sleeves. I wouldn't mind trying to do a few custom patterns too if I can get a few hours in before the holidays.

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Steve! I'm so sorry about the late reply to your comment!

      I haven't made the models publicly available as yet, but I may take the time to create a few extra templates and make a thing out of it!

      For (hopefully) obvious reasons this item will not be deemed 'foodsafe' due to the 3d printing process inherently leaving small gaps and crevices. However some reading leads me to believe that the same problem exists with wooden utensils (which is why stainless utensils are used in commercial cooking, again, according to the article I read. Please do your own research if this matters to you!) But regardless, I'd be happy to give the design to the world ;-)

      Since I use Autodesk Inventor at work it is my go-to program for this sort of thing. I've designed a sleeve template for inventor which can take a .DXF file (standard for 2D cad drawings) and emboss it around the sleeve. It would be fairly straightforward to edit if you are good at inventor, but almost impossible if you are not. Unfortunately I don't know any freeware programs well enough to re-do the design in them. I probably won't do a tutorial but if you have some requests which seem like they may be popular I'll happily add them when I have the time :-)

      Delete
  3. Are the templates available for sale or as a download?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Kaci!

      I will probably upload the parts to Thingiverse at somepoint soon. There is no real "template" for the sleeve except the one I use myself which I've created in Autodesk Inventor (meaning, unless you have inventor you will not be able to open it / edit it).

      I could potentially export a 'blank' sleeve that could be a template for some advanced CAD users, but this would not be an easy item to edit for beginners / intermediate users.

      Delete
  4. Are the templates available for sale or as a download?

    ReplyDelete