3D Printing Larger Objects, (pt. 1 of N)
This is marked as part 1 of N because I suspect it may become an ongoing series.
So here’s where the rubber meets the road with 3D printing, in my opinion: printing objects larger than just small trinkets and figurines. I spent part of the last weekend trying to print something “big”.
The first thing I looked at printing I had minimal success with - I tried to print a plate or tile with a flatter version of this carving on it using the image converter Design App in MatterControl. If you want to see how I tweaked the photo to try and get it to play nice with the algorithm, have a look below:
This did not work, so I returned to a simplified version of the Eiffel Tower print from before. When I blew it up in size to max out the possible dimensions of the printer I have, it threw a print time of 1 day, 6 hours and 45 minutes! In that amount of time, you could get to the actual Eiffel Tower and back again from where I live on the U.S. east coast.
When I mentioned this on Twitter, several users responded to show prints that had taken as long as a week to complete. Even with something like Octoprint that sounds like it would quickly become an unmanageable project for most people, but the huge castle print is admittedly very impressive.
The next thing I ran into was leveling for one of these huge prints. I scaled the Eiffel tower down to something that could print in more like 6 hours, and immediately: made a giant freaking mess. It turns out that the bed that seemed perfectly level when I cranked out dozens of dog tags and keychains was not when I needed to use more of it.
By the time I got it in better shape I was running out of weekend in which to complete something that complex and I settled on printing a decent scale model of one of the Easter Island heads. I really like the results - the texture came out at a very high quality, in my opinion. I peeled off the raft and have it on display in my living room by one of those fancy lamps no one actually uses for anything. Probably my best print so far, but I am determined to eventually knock out the other projects that were attempted without success.