My first Flexible print: a bracelet

Though I bought the bottle of resin more than a month ago, I haven’t had time to work with it. Tonight, I had a great experience with Flexible resin making a bracelet for my sister for Christmas.

My sister has a jewelry company, Dalla Nonna, that sells a couple different products. One of them is their signature, a calendar that people customize. I thought it’d be cool to give her a bracelet version but in flexible resin (they’ re normally precious metals, obviously).

I modeled it in Autodesk Fusion 360, exported it through Meshmixer, and into Preform. I used basically the default rotation/support setup, though I wish I’d tweaked the latter: there was a LOT of resin wasted in the raft that wasn’t directly supporting anything.

The resin itself - printed in a fresh tank - worked perfectly. No apparent flaws.

Now, the design is kind of interesting: because Flexible has low elongation, I didn’t want her to be tempted to stretch it past her hand. Instead, I made it with two sockets available to insert small rare earth magnets into. I then hand-dabbed (with a clean straw) a tiny bit of resin on top of each magnet. I held the bracelet into my UV tank, manually curing those bits of resin. So-separated by resin, the magnets hold just perfectly. Strong enough to hold the bracelet on, but not strong enough to tear the resin.

All in all, I’m really excited to give it to her for Christmas. Considering the ease, and how nice it looks (except for some attachment points where it might have looked better if I UV cured it before trimming) I might make some other pieces to go with it.

3 Likes

Very cool! I love the magnet fastener idea!

Jory