Torture Toaster!

Hey there, wonderful people!

So, a few months ago I had a guest spot on the Edge of Tech YouTube channel, where I rambled on and on about printing and design.  They were awesome and passionate people, and the show was a lot of fun!  After the show they challenged me to make some kind of fun torture test that they could use when testing printers, and just to make the world a slightly more fun place in general.  

Obviously, we needed a toaster.

But what is this thing?  It's a print-in-place pop-up toaster with hinged sides,  an integrated lever and sliding linkage to move the toast, geared locking pins, and a few things that will put your printing setup to the test.  If it's all printed successfully, you'll be able to push down that side lever and watch the toast pop up!  If things have gone wrong, your toast may well be forever condemned to stay on the ground.

The funny thing is, I had to actively make this tougher to print, because I've well-and-truly trained my brain to design for reliable printing :)

Printing Tips

Okay, let's think about all the things that can go wrong here!

1. Bed adhesion.  This is by far the most important thing.  There are some sliding tolerance testing pins that have only small contact area with the bed.  These will test your bed adhesion the most, and failure can lead to some internal spaghetti that can weld parts together.  Also, the sliding pins will look bad.  Or absent.

2. Elephant footing.  There's a degree of risk mitigation built into the model, but if you squish it down hard enough you'll potentially weld the side cogs into their housings and join all the moving toast parts together.  The sides may also not be able to fold up if the elephant footing is too bad!

3. Stringing.  Your toast will look bad if you have any stringing.  Severe stringing will stop your toast moving at all!  This is a risk factor for any articulated model, but this one has stuff moving in all sorts of directions.

4. Anything that compromises dimensional integreity.  So, overextrusion, warping, shifting, anything that lets a piece extend beyond its intended area can cause bonding, block movement, impair hinges, and so on. 

Other than that, though, it's easy!

The model prints base-down with the sides folded out, like so:

File Location

This one's freely available and will be published in a few places, but it's included on Dropbox for convenience.  You'll find it under: 767 Torture Toaster

(Dropbox link post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/dropbox-and-are-31697592 )

Further Thoughts

There are few things more fun than coming up with a ridiculous idea and then taking it very seriously.  Enjoy the toast! :D

xoxo

Sven.