3D Printing a Key

In today's blog, I wanted to show you something that was a bit off the wall.  One of my students asked me how we could go from taking a photo of an object to printing a duplicate.  So, in this example, we are going to use a key.

Step 1:

One of the first things you will need to do to get this to work is a decent picture of your key.
For the purpose of this, I used PhotoShop.  At first, I had the image of the actual key.  Then I added a layer on top of the key and painted it black.  For some reason, the .gif file looks odd, but in the last step I removed the entire background just leaving me the black image of a key.  From there, I went to http://www.online-convert.com/ and turned my .jpg file into a .svg file. 

Step 2:  

Once you have your .svg file, you then need to turn it into an actual 3D model.  I used www.tinkercad.com for this.  When you open TinkerCad, you will notice an "import" button on the top right.  Once I did this, I simply imported my file.

Step 3:

If there is a tricky step, this is it.  You have to scale your key to the correct size.  I had measured his key beforehand, but you could do the same thing by looking up the key's dimensions online too.  After that, simply print your file.

I was really surprised at how easy this was.  The key worked too.  The only thing I would recommend is that if you were wanting to make a permanent key, you should probably print something besides PLA plastic.  If you are printing something quick though, it does work!

Note:  A video on how we did this is located here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNalicZTGK4