Sugar Star

Beyond the Manual
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Updated below! Here’s a sneak peek:

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Made a shallow box, smoothed some sugar in the bottom with card stock, and rasterized a solid star at 1000/80 @125 lpi.

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The box (around 3cm deep) kept the sugar from blowing, but also localized a bit of smoke. There was no movement from the fans, but the sugar grains pop around a bit as the laser hits them.

At these speeds, there’s not any perceptible yellowing, and the star seems fairly sturdy.

Thoughts:

  • A shallower box would hold the sugar but maybe hold less smoke.
  • Fine-grained sugar would probably work better.
  • Is sugar smoke any harder on the GF than the other smoke I’ve created?

My girls were fascinated. We’ll see if any edible masterpieces appear in the future…

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How sweet it is! (Yeah I got to say it first!) :grin:

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Any flyaway sugar from the air assist?

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Perfect example of sintering!

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One of the first sintering based hobbyist 3D printers was the “candy fab”. it printed VERY LARGE parts in sugar! Very very cool and we always wondered how it’d work with a laser.

I think the key is to be able to turn off the fan. With that off and with a careful additive layering process, you got yourself a 3D printer right there. :slight_smile:

https://candyfab.org

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There was actually no problem with the air interfering. In fact next time I’ll try with a shorter box for better smoke removal.

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You sure that’s sugar right? We don’t want to read about the first Glowforge becoming addicted…(as opposed to the opposite which is now happening daily) :star_struck:

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Thanks for the link! Going rabbit hole leads to this:

https://www.3dsystems.com/culinary/gallery

With images like:

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Yep, that’s a whole different level!

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That is amazing! Now, are they edible?

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Couldn’t resist another go at this with a more elaborate design.
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This time I ran 800/80 @125lpi and did two passes in one go. I spun the sugar for 5 minutes in a food processor to make it a little finer, didn’t have any ultra-fine already on hand.

The end product could deal with very gentle handling, but some of the thinner parts of the design were still quite fragile, and some gapping appeared that aggravated things even more.

So again but with three separate passes, this time adding a thin coating of sugar between each pass. And success! The result is quite strong and the gapping is eliminated.

Here’s the result from the front:

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Here’s from the back:
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A side note: This was my first no-tray GF project. I was initially quite worried about getting the precise computed distance, but quickly discovered that it really didn’t matter. Just putting “0” for the distance, even when I re-adjusted heights (box edges came too close to the head) gave the same precise focus. The little red-laser test at the beginning seems to take care of everything. I’m sure there are some cases where precision matters, but in general I’m going to become a lot lazier in this regard.

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There’s no change in flavor, they taste like sugar. Note that the GF manual clearly states that you should have a food-only GF if you want to create edibles, so there is that to consider.

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This is such an unbelievably cool application. :sunglasses:

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This is just astonishingly cool.

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Sweet !

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Mind blown :exploding_head: honestly how do you think of this stuff?

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