Community Centre 3D printed: Part 2/4.

More tech talk, if you don’t like that, just look at the pic and wait till next blog to show the assembly. 

By the time that I had to design a new tree, my Blender skills had improved due to another project I was nearly done with. I had an oak tree which I downloaded before I had the skills to sculpt it properly in Blender. It needed to be twisted, warped and corrected to fit the planned activity levels. I became much faster too to tweak designs by now. Within a week, despite that subtracting and uniting parts in Blender is utterly illogical to make it work, I had the design. 

This is it at that point, I did improved it and cleaned it up after. It's a printscreen from the front in Blender. The base is really wide, which made it perfectly sturdy. As you can see, it has more branches than the first model, so I added even more activity centers. Yay! 

Instead of a spiral staircase like in the first design, which was too frail to print on a non-resin printer as supports kept breaking off, I added a labyrinth of sturdy stairs and platforms, mostly at the back, which makes it look like real fun to use. By putting them at the back, they are more "hidden" and it offers a surprise factor. Your inner child should feel the urge to run up and down on them everywhere, lol.

I prefer to use Cura as a slicer to tell my printer what to do, because the rafts and brims are constructed better, and the glorious tree supports! You can't print in thin air, these are perfect to hold items up and remove them after printing.

I was finally ready to cut the tree into printable chunks. Cutting a huge irregular part like a tree took some figuring out on how to do so. More grey hairs, lol! All pieces needed to be cut in parts which did fit the printbed and printable height. The eye wants something too, so I just could not cut in very obvious spots. And most important, sturdiness still has priority. I did 3 attempts until it finally came out in useable acceptable chunks, which took about 3 hours each.Wew!

My Prusa printer had a lot of technical difficulties to overcome and find workarounds for. One of the problems I encountered: dimensional inaccuracies. Although I did take in account that there might be some after printing, meaning that the actual sizes did not match the design's ones. I expected a few millimeters overall, as that would have been normal, as I don’t have a professional printer and due to the fact that it drools a bit, correcting it is almost impossible. I thought I had it covered by not printing the simple straight connecting stairs yet, which connected platforms, and L-shaped steps. I figured I would create the stairs, but measure their actual height before printing. 

I was miffed that the actual height differed a lot more than acceptable, even though the width was perfect. *headdesk* Underextrusion, my best guess. All settings are at maximum, bummer. This meant that the biggest mushroom did not fit in its designated spot and it meant swapping activity centers around. I did not want to reprint that mushroom and make it shorter, as it was a 5 day print job. As the mushroom bodies were separate from their hats, it was easier to fit parts together, swapping bodies and hats separately for some. 

It also affected the canopies actual planned position height also altered where they were placed in comparison to the plan. This mess resulted in a big issue with all the stairs, their platforms, and L-shaped stairs: none  fit as planned at all anymore because of this. I sighed deeply and just decided to treat the stairs setup as a giant 3D-puzzle. I used all printed staircase pieces as they fit on the fly. I even enjoyed it, lol. In the end, I actually only had to discard 2 small staircase pieces I printed, wew.

 

I am always a stickler for trying to save money, so I always use leftover PLA pieces to print rafts or brims. Those increase the objects adhesion surface and get removed after printing. Those get recycled, as city hall collects plastic.

 

That was it for the tech talk. More about assembly next time!