The Zombie Apocalypse Guide to 3D printing: Designing and printing practical things

by Clifford T. Smyth

The Zombie Apocalypse Guide to 3D printing is written for the person who wants to use their printer to make practical, durable items for everyday use.

Whether rebuilding civilization from your jungle hideaway, fighting off zombie hordes, or just printing a new plastic bit for your latest project, The Zombie Apocalypse Guide to 3D printing has what you need to get the job done.

If you are going to buy just one book for your 3D printing toolbox, this should be it. With 180+ pages and more than 65 illustrations and photos, this easy to read volume contains sections on:

- designing for 3d printing
- optimizing your designs for strength and printability
- printing at 2x+ speed for prototyping
- leveraging “vitamins” to multiply the usefulness of your printed designs
- how to template and prototype replacement parts
- calculating safe working loads for printed objects
- basic paradigms for 3D design
- calibrating and adjusting your printer
- troubleshooting common printing problems
- operating your printer from improvised power supplies
– and much, much more.

With a tongue in cheek nod to the zombie mythos, this volume will enable you to manufacture things on your desktop that you might otherwise have to purchase, painstakingly craft, or do without. Emphasizing independence and solving practical problems, this book will help the reader to design and manufacture new items as well as making perfect fitting repair and replacement parts.

No matter what type of 3D printer you use, reading The Zombie Apocalypse Guide to 3D printing will help you to improve your design skills and understand critical technical details, help you to identify and correct common printing problems, and expand your horizons in the 3d printing with the use of the most effective design methods.

138 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 1, 2016

Reviews

[Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short and sweet! A nice little reference manual for 3D printing. Bonus: Gives detailed instructions for how to burn your house down in the supplementary material.

[Lloyd Earickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was in early middle school, I remember reading about 3D printers.  Rather sensationally, they were compared to Star Trek -style replicators, heralded as the future of manufacturing technology, an enabling technology for the next massive revolution in industry.  These machines were the size of a closet, required special power supplies to operate, and special materials in the form of resins and solvents to create objects.  They cost tens of thousands of dollars, and, while I recognized they were nothing at all like Star Trek replicator technology, they fascinated me.  It was probably the ability to convert anything I could draw with CAD into a physical object with the press of a button, as easily as you could print off this book review on your LaserJet.  When I discovered that my high school’s engineering section had a 3D printer, I thought it was the greatest opportunity I could hope for, and used it for all sorts of minor projects and models during my time there, including a new device to manufacture avionics – an altimeter, I think it was – that the company we partnered with is probably still using.

Times change.  For one thing, when was the last time you actually printed out an article you read on the internet?  For another, I’ve watched as 3D printers went from massive, industrial machines reserved for laboratories to devices that will fit on a desk and cost only a few hundred dollars.  I have one myself, these days, and have used it for projects as diverse as improving my wife’s ice cream maker, and TENGs that flew in space.  In truth, I probably don’t use it as much as I should.  I’m still not accustomed to having it, I suppose, and professionally I’ve mainly used 3D printers for rapid prototyping and modelling before creating the actual part in a different material.

Industrial 3D printers have become increasingly capable, too, although you won’t find laser-sintering, metal powder printing devices sitting on countertops any time soon.  3D printers can even print parts strong enough to be used in rocket engines.  What can be neglected in all the hype around the technology, though, is that 3D printing is a manufacturing technology.  It is not a perfect, one-to-one transfer of a digital object to the physical world, and designing parts and devices for 3D printing is more complicated than printing out a paper.  Despite the sensational title, The Zombie Apocalypse Guide to 3D Printing is a nuts-and-bolts exploration of the unmentioned realities of designing and implementing with common, polymer-based, extrusion 3D printers.

It's a brief book – I read it in a single morning – but it is dense with details.  There are no words wasted on framing narratives or theory.  Instead, Smyth presents page after page, complete with pictures and diagrams, of nitty-gritty, empirical details about the behavior of 3D printed parts, basic principles for designing with the intent of 3D printing, how to optimize for print efficiency, the details of how digital models are converted into instructions for the printer, and how to calibrate the printer to achieve better results.  From the anisotropic nature of fused filament fabrication to ways to make a given print faster and not tax the motor, to rules of thumb by which to design digital models with tolerances appropriate for personal use 3D printers, the book is replete with obvious, hard-won experience.

I was glad to read this book in hard copy, instead of on my Kindle.  The text is large, and there is a lot of white space on each page, which leaves me plenty of room to correct the book’s main flaw: the equations aren’t written as equations.  Smyth provides numerous basic equations and mathematical relationships which are handy for 3D printing design and calibration, but he writes them in paragraph form, like this: the instantaneous velocity of an eccentric orbit is equal to the square root of the quantity of two times the quantity of the sum of the total energy of the system and the quotient of the parent body’s gravitational parameter and the instantaneous radius of the orbit.  Maybe he was trying to get around including equations in the text, which is often said to reduce readership, but this presentation is worse, in my opinion, than just writing out the equation as an equation.  I wrote the equation form myself in the margins.

The zombie apocalypse framing is a little unnecessary, but it’s mostly unobtrusive.  It does lead Smyth to include an appendix on running a 3D printer off of non-standard power supplies, which was quite interesting.  Even though it’s unlikely, at least for the foreseeable future, that I would need to use his advice, it’s interesting to know how different power supplies can affect the printer and the way it prints.  Perhaps that, along with my belief that the tolerances on the print should be significantly tighter than the +/- 0.2mm Smyth recommends for a 0.4mm nozzle, is evidence that I’m spoiled by the environments and capabilities with which I usually design.  Then again, a tolerance of +/- 0.2mm is unacceptable on many satellite components, so my bias is somewhat understandable.

The Zombie Apocalypse Guide to 3D Printing is a basic book in many respects, but it is packed with practical details, and it’s the sort of book that will sit by my home lab setup so that I can reference it when I’m doing actual design and 3D printing.  It’s also an excellent reminder, which perhaps only I need, that plastic 3D printers can, by incorporating basic design principles, be useful for more than rapid prototyping and modeling (as in, they can be used for practical manufacturing, too).  If you’re looking for a place to start with 3D printing, this would be a solid option with 98% infill.

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decent beginner information, but has nothing to do with 3D printing in the Zombie Apocalypse. The title is really misleading. It's a beginners guide to 3D printing and terms, nothing more. The zombie apocalypse isn't used as a literary device, as the author claims in the beginning.

[Alexander Megill]

this book is super good for the starting enginer with a 3D printer. it was an easy read.