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c3pin

queer pride flag pins!

i made these pins to give them away at gpn23 for free :3

two pins with a nonbinary flag secured by a safety pin a bunch of plasctic rectangular trans and enby flags scattered on a table

donations are very welcome since it took a lot of work and i want to bring even more next year!

process

the pins are 3d printed using a single extruder (prusa mk3s+ at the wrocław hackspace). making 64 flags at a time took 2h30m and required 2 filament swaps (per batch) for the trans flag and 3 swaps for the enby flag.

they are printed facing up, starting from the white. then on the last layer the white strip is printed, after which the printer waits for a filament swap to print the next color. when a strip is done, it's ironed to leave a cleaner finish.

16 trans flags being 3d printed

i want many

the process had to be scalable. i was glad to find a hack in the prusa slicer (reddit comment) where i could force the command for tool change to be the filament swap command. this allowed me to add one extruder for each color in the software and then when it came to printing, the printer would print each color to the end and ask for a filament swap for the next color!

screenshot of a prusa project with 16 trans flags showing colors split into extruders

this aproach results in just one swap for every color after the base color. it's possible because the colorful part of the flag is just one layer tall (0.2 mm).

then i could mass produce them.

two 3d printers making 64 flags each at once

securing flags to the pins

the flag was falling of the pin backing easily if they were glued together, both with superglue and epoxy. superglue would unstick from the metal and epoxy would unstick from the plastic. so with how well the superglue works with plastic, i tried sandwiching the pin between the flag and a plastic backing. now it seems the flag would sooner break than fall off the pin.

the back of a flag with a pin secured by a glued piece of plastic the back of a flag with a safety pin secured by a glued piece of plastic

future plans

this is where i'm at with this project. i had the right colors for those flags and i wanted to wear them, that's why i started with those. i definitely plan to make way more designs (lesbian and ace were the most requested) - if you want to suggest ideas, my dms are open!

the process i developed doesn't have to be used only for flags. for example, i experimented with making a boykisser pin with a friend who knows more about 3d modelling. you can take a look at the process in this fedi thread.

she open my source

i'm making all of this open source ofc. while i know very little about 3d modelling and the last time i was deeply interested in 3d printing was 6 years ago, i will try to share what i used and i hope you can gather all this into a working endless pin production pipeline.

download: c3pin.zip

this zip contains:

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