Community Centre 3D printed: Part 3/4.

No more tech talk for this project! Assembly pics, yay!

I had a few days delay in printing, as I had to print parts for hub as well, it has been warm and a printer does give off some heat, plus we had stuff to do away from home, and I never print when I am not present. And, I was inspired to print extra items, lol. You know me by know! Could not resist, bwahahahah! 

Almost done printing as we speak, time to finish decorating the lot, take pics, make videos and compile it all into 1 storyline vid. Part of the vid is already made as well. 

Finding the right tree color in a decent PLA filament was a challenge. It had to look a bit like oak, and fit my existing Sylvanian forest. There are PLA's available with actual wood components, but they smell of burnt wood during printing, which I did not want inside my house. 

As far as the activity centers on the platforms, I had enough colors to pick and choose from to print from various brands. I went for candy colors and metal tones.

 

The canopies needed to look vibrant, but the green colors of PLA filament to print which they sell up to now, looked unnatural as leafy colors, except olive, but I wanted a vibrant color without burning my retinas, lol. I then stumbled onto something new, a dual color silk green and yellow pla. That means that there are 2 colors printing in one go, and it has a weird optical effect. The yellow looked greenish, so that looked very appealing and ended my search. Once printed, it made me chuckle, as the green color varies from darker green to light green when you move your position. Very special indeed!

Almost everything is 3D printed in the design, but I did add some resin glow in the dark mushrooms. PLA filament to print exists in varied glow in the dark colors, but it's very abrasive to the printer's nozzle, so I don't use that, as replacing a nozzle in my printer is very hard to do. 

3D printed parts were glued together with super glue, UHU Model Kit for permanent sturdy fixings in where the glue never shows as it turns a bit yellow,  or Pattex Multi. The UHU allows a brief period on adjusting into place, longer than superglue, but still fast enough to avoid struggling. I used Pattex Special for plastic in the past, this one is even better, as it settles faster.

Here's one of the tiny objects I printed: a foosball! By the way, the actual "ball" is a printed ball of yarn, thought that would fit the cat theme of it. The sticks are made from toothpicks, the handles from beads.

 

A 3 foot tall tree has to be bottom heavy not to topple over, even if it has a wide base. You can up the infill of the print, but that adds drastically to the printing time and filament is costly. I never print at night due to safety reasons. Instead, I bought marbles for the tree root parts, and used pebbles and stones I had lying around as well. I cut parts open in MeshMixer, printed the “lid” separately, filled the part up and glued the "box" shut permanently.

This is what I mean with infill. Yes, you can actually fill a part up to 100%. I sometimes do, when it's a small part which actually needs to function or be extra sturdy. I did print some root parts in 30% infill on the first layer, because they were hard to fill up with marbles due to their shape. Then 15% on the second layer, and 8% from then on. It does not only provide for firmness, but if a model has a top part that's closed, it acts as supports to hold that up.

I had added some mushrooms to the bark of the tree in its design, to make it look more interesting. Those were painted after printing. 

Once an entire tree layer was printed, trunk parts were fitted to see if it had worked out. I glued layer per layer and let each layer rest to dry before adding the next. Each layer was always tested, plugs included, before gluing it together. Tape can become very handy to help out in holding parts together till the glue has set. I would not advise to use superglue on such a cut up model, because you need some time to make it all fit together well. 

As you can see on pics below, there are visible seems everywhere at this point. I was a bit surprised by this though, and found out later what caused this. See below.

After gluing parts together, the seems were closed using wood putty in a color which came close to the PLA 3D print filament. Well, that was the plan anyway. I received the wrong color, a paler tone. I reported it and got a discount, so I decided to keep it, as the color I wanted was no longer in stock. 

This putty worked out so well, that I changed my plan. I first thought of removing excess putty from the tree with a wet cloth, but it offered an extra depth to the bark, so the entire tree was rubbed with putty. One box sufficed very well, about 2/3 was used on this 3 foot high tree. 

The day after, the tree was slightly sanded with a flexible sanding block, to remove any sharpness of the wood putty. The seems were rubbed again with putty. This is the back of the tree. The gaps are for installing platforms. 

 

Next day, again some light sanding. Then some matte PU varnish was brushed on. PU is extra strong, that's why I used it. It turns a bit yellow over many years, but this tree color masks that, so it is preferable over acrylic varnish for this purpose. This is the front of the tree. As you can see, the tree has many large branches to decorate with activity centers!

The acrylic base at the root was covered with artificial moss to make it look real. Glue was rubbed on with a disposable hair dye brush, moss sprinkled over and pushed on by hand. Excess was removed after it dried with a brush. It even goes up the base of the roots a little, to make it look more realistic. I used different types of moss deliberately.

Each platform has an activity center on top, but they can come off, they are not glued, except one because of how it is constructed, so it would be easier to the move the tree around. 

The staircases, made from platforms, stairs and L-shaped stairs, were glued onto the tree and platforms. Small clamp tools came in handy to do this part.

Time to glue the canopies on and let them dry till the next day. Then the mushroom activity centers' platforms were glued on top. As always, everything was fitted well before using permanent glue.  In my case, a serious dimensional inaccuracy height wise, not in width, caused me to swap platforms and redoing all the staircases I had planned. I also had to adapt sone canopies because of it.

Once assembled, I was inspired for more activities or extra details. I went hunting for printable files and printed some more stuff to make it more interesting.

Sometimes, a design does not always work out. This entire tree is created from tweaking existing printable models. It can go from minor changes, to elaborate ones. I created a lovely roof, but none of my computers here was strong enough to slice it, meaning calculate what the printer has to do with it and turn it into a file. Bummer! Not even our best gaming PC could cope with doing the job! Here's a printscreen of the design. It was an oak leaves rooftop with an acorn shell at the top.

There is a trolley cart on the tree. I just could have made a simple "pull me up", but the tech geek in me could not resist to take it a step further. But, how far would I take it? 

I actually could have added an empty chamber in the tree, installed a tiny motor with batteries, closed it off with a clickable lid. I could also have connected the steering wheels with gears, switches, wires, to make it work by hand. But, as I don't need details like that for myself, I just constructed it as if it could work if I had wanted to, but no parts hidden inside the tree. 

I can make the main parts move by hand, that suffices. Not that I would besides for taking pics, but the satisfaction of the possibility is all I needed. Here's a sketch. On the left is how it looks, on the right are arrows on hos the wheels turn, or the cables turn, and they can reverse direction.

 

The only regret I have, is that I did not design the tree 4 feet high instead of 3,3!! When I ever move from here, I actually will rescale the entire design, improve it and print everything again. My next printer will have a larger print volume, so the tree can be cut in much bigger chunks to print. To deal with the dimensional inaccuracies, I will attach all staircases, platforms and canopies in the design to print in one go. 

Multicolor prints are possible now, the printer just swaps filament when needed. You actually color parts in the software to do so. This will be much sturdier too. New printers print at least 3 times faster, as they have completely different technology, so printing bigger parts will be easy as pie. 

Keep your eyes peeled for the next blog, next weekend! Hope you enjoyed the journey so far!