Project 1: Digital Surrealism

Project Statement

I was talking about this project with my instructor and what surrealism meant. As defined in the project requirements, "the original meaning of the found object must be transformed through the process of augmentation." I pointed to my water bottle and showed my instructor how I could turn the water bottle into a pen with the bottle part holding the ink, by screwing onto the bottle a 3D printed "pen nib." Here is my initial sketch.

(Initial sketch)

Process

Then I went out and found a water bottle that looks most like a pen. Using the water bottle dimension, I defined the dimensions of the pen nib. 

(Defining the dimension of the 3D printed part)

I tried printing several parts with different threads to find the right thread that can be screwed onto the bottle. I adjusted the diameter, pitch of the threads, etc.

(3D models of bottle caps with different threads)

(None of the threads fit the bottle correctly)

But none would fit the bottle correctly. I ended up abandoning trying to make the thread and instead decided to just use the cap that came with the bottle.

I 3D printed the pen nib, almost like that on a marker. But then it felt odd sitting so much wider than the rest of the bottle. It didn't look like a pen.

(First iteration of the pen nib)

Final Product

(Much better looking this time)

(Hotgluing the bottle cap)

(Putting a piece of paper towel so ink doesn't all come out at once)

Final Thought

What went well was that I got pretty on the pretty much all the dimensions right on the first iteration of 3D print. What went OK was that even though I wasn't able to get the pen nip to sit flush with the bottle, I was able to get that right on the 2nd try. When didn't went well was that I couldn't get the thread to work. If I had more time, I would have dug deeper into how to make the thread correctly so anyone can take the stl file and print out the model and use it right away without having to resort to hot gluing.