Printing a Grate

The first attempt involved hand-sawing over 60 individual pockets in a solid 9mm MDF board. In addition to this being A LOT of work to saw and sand the pockets, the result was way too sloppy. Some kind of computer-aided router would probably be the best solution, but that is beyond my toolset. At the time I did not own a 3D-printer, but a friend was willing to do some 3D-printing for me if needed.

The whole display is rather big and could certainly not be printed as a whole. Actually the printer we had available had a rather small working area. So the idea became to print individual, more-or-less standard pockets and combine these to a grate lateron. A simple design tool was used to create STL files from a 2D design and over a couple of days, all the pockets were printed.

A transparant piece of plastic was placed over the printout of the artwork that I created. This would be the placeholder to make sure that pockets ended up in the right position. Individual pockets are glued down on the placeholder and the remaining space will be filled with epoxy to end up with a solid grate.

The construction of the desk panel will be a bit different, because most of this panel will not be lit. One grate for the gambling game is created by glueing together 9 rectangular pockets. The outside of the pockets was made square to make glueing straight-forward and 4 tunnels were drawn in each piece to add more stability in the 3D print.