Making a shot glass and toasting the success of your 3D printer has
become a tradition of sorts with the RepRap group to which I belong,
that is, if having been done twice before; once in New Zealand with Vik
Olliver's Zaphod some months ago followed a few months later by Ed
Sells and Adrian Bowyer's A.R.N.I.E.
Well, this morning it was
Tommelise's turn. I know enough now about printing with HDPE to know
that my Slice and Dice routine is not put together well enough to use
for making a glass just now, so I built up a two-part XML file that the
Tommelise Control Panel could read and used that instead.
I first printed a 2 layer HDPE raft and then began to print the 1 layer sides.
...more follows
I'd printed the raft last night and finished about 0400 this morning,
not that it took that long, mind, but I was having a bit of previously
mentioned drama with the Mk 1 AEM extruder. For a 75% heating/40%
gearmotor setting I found that 99% of the clutch slippage on the
gearmotor was happening when I tried to back up the filament a touch
between laying down filament.

I watched the print for a while and when nothing exciting happened went
off into the kitchen of my flat to wash dishes and do a bit of
breakfast. Of course, my impulse control isn't that wonderful so I
peeked out to make sure that nothing horrible had happened every few
minutes.

Mostly, there was not much to see except a slowly growing shot glass.
I still have a little x-axis drift but it's consistent now and doesn't
really ruin prints.

When I wrote the little routine to develop the sides of the glass
yesterday I had a bit of a difficult time taking in that the volume of
a glass varies as the square of it's radius, not linearly.

I knew that intellectually, but when you're just designing a glass it's
sometimes a little difficult to get your head around the reality. As a
result of that, my first glass was 15 mm in diameter, just about big
enough to get the tip of my little finger in.

I then overcompensated and did a few layers of one with a 75 mm
diameter. That one would have been suitable for either ice tea or
liver damage.

After four more tries I settled on a 35 mm diameter, straight-sided, octagonal shot glass.

I then realised that I really didn't know how much was supposed to be
in a shot glass since it's been many years since I drank regularly
enough to keep a grip on that kind of trivia.
One ounce (30 ml) came to mind and after a Google search I found that
in this, at least, my memory hadn't betrayed me. This at 0200 in the
morning, mind. Then, I remembered that RepRap is a British managed
project, so I did some more looking and discovered that a British shot
glass comes in 25 ml and 35 ml sizes.
For the 35 mm diameter I had a depth of 20 mm would give me 26 ml which is a small British shot glass with enough of a lip to avoid unnecessary spillage.
I started the sides print on the 2 layer raft at about 0900. It finished just as I finished the dishes at about 0940.
I did a quick check to see that it was waterproof and then got the McAllan's.
I had a quick shot and after a
moments consideration decided that another was due since I'd resolved
back in February not to drink any of my 12 year-old McAllan's single
malt till I'd printed a glass to drink it with.

That ... was perhaps not such a good idea. As I said, I don't drink a
lot. On top of that I hadn't made any breakfast and had got about 3
hours sleep the previous night. About half-way through the second shot
the effect of the ethanol hit me and I had to stop and consider things
for a moment before I finished it. It was then I realised that the
sun was definitely NOT over the yardarm, seeing it was right at 1000.
Anyway, that is my account of the printing of the shot glass. The
McAllan's goes back in the liquor cabinet which is otherwise known as
my hall closet, a space that also acts as storage for many other useful
things including toothpaste and vacuum cleaner bags.