3D Printing Ear Savers
Tags: Cura, Medical, Tinkercad, Ear Saver, 3D Printing

3D Printing Ear Savers

Just a small journey on how I discovered and started printing Ear Savers rav3n Apr 23, 2020·6 min read

Hey Reader! I hope you’re doing well during quarantine. With all the content on the internet, I really appreciate that you’re right here, reading my thoughts.

If you haven’t heard of them, Ear Savers are these little devices that remove the tension of the elastic bands of surgery mask off the ears shown here. After finding the design for these, I started printing as many as I could but first let’s go back to where this journey started.

So for the past few weeks, I’ve been pretty unmotivated to code which happens from time to time and it’ll pass. It’s probably this whole COVID-19 thing /change of day-to-day flow, maybe you’ve heard of it? In the meantime, I ordered a 3d printer since I’ve always been super interested in learning how to use one and what possibilities they offered. I went with the Ender 3 Pro here. Based on the reviews, it seemed pretty solid for a starter printer ($289).

the Setup

Once it arrived, I went through the setup and chose the dog as my starting 3d printed “Pokemon” (printer comes with a dog, cat, and pig .gcode files ready to print on a micro SD). G-code files are a set of instructions for telling a computerized machine tool how to build something. After that successful build right out of the gate, I tried the other animals then I switched to a different filament other than using the prepackaged one (it’s white) that came with the printer.

I tried to print the dog with a different color of filament, black this time, and it printed just fine using the default extruder nozzle temperature (200 degree C) and bed (50 degrees C). I switched the filament to silk rainbow here with the default settings and got a different result. The filament wasn’t flowing out of the extruder as smoothly, so I assumed (noob here, hi) that the temperature of the extruder nozzle needed to be hotter. I kept playing around until I got to 209 and upped the bed to 60 degree celsius. This seemed to be the ideal. So here is what I found that been netting me successful results so far with the filament I’ve used:

But getting the temperature down is only half the battle; the other half was leveling the bed and loosing the wheels a little. Leveling will change per printer but I found a really good video for my printer. Using the .gcode files in that video, I was able to level the bed really well (break out the stickers).

the Design

So the Design…at first, I started poking around Thingvere — a place where you can download .stl files made by members the community. STL files are basically exports of 3d models from CAD software. Once you have the models, you convert or slice them into a set of instructions (.gcode for example) that the printer can understand. Let me be clear though, it’s not always as easy as it sounds. Sometimes the designs have flaws that the printer may struggle with. Your printer itself may have its own limitation. So if you get a design you want to print, it may take some tweaking of the design, temperatures, printer speed, etc to get it perfect.