View source for The Star and Gear in Color

[[File:epwts8g.jpeg|thumb]]

Here's the star and gear in color. It's the largest thing I've printed so far, at about 150 mm in diameter. There were some problems on the left side you can see, but since I'm not a 3D printing veteran and can't really see the details of the process as it happens I'm not sure what caused them. All in all I'm fairly pleased.

The downside of multicolor printing is it adds a TON of time to the print, since there's only one nozzle it has to purge the old color before it can start extruding the new color. My trick to avoiding this with a flat print like this is to have each color be a different height. The white outline/base is 1 mm thick, the blue gear is 1.2 mm thick, the yellow star is 1.4, and the red ring is 1.6 mm thick. You can see a blue-green &quot;halo&quot; around the star where it hasn't risen above the gear's 1.2 mm.

The bonus for me is that it makes the print more tactily interesting. I printed this with the standard 0.2 mm layer height, but with something this big I should have probably used thicker layers with a corresponding increase to the heights of each color. That would also cut the time down.

Not sure if y'all find this print stuff interesting or not, but I'm happy to bring some of the 3D models I made in Blender into the real world. All of these flat prints started out as SVG files I made in Inkscape. Then I imported the file into Blender, converted the Besier curve paths into meshes, and added some height. I have to do the coloring in the slicer before sending it to the printer.


[[Category:Meta]] [[Category:Megathread Uploads]]