Scaled up 2X. Everything can be printed in a 10x10 x10 print volume.
Printed with Bone filament (Marble White from Vortex 3Dp)
0.1mm layers
24% infill.
465:45 hours of printing and 2049 grams (4.5 lbs) of filament.
Printed on two RB2 printers and an RB3 printer. Built from kits and upgraded with my own 3D printed components and hardware from ReliaBuild3D.
Most of this was printed without supports (all but two parts) but a large brim (10 -20 lines) was required to get small bed contact area parts to stick to the bed. Ribs were the big trick to figure out here but with a large brim and printing just two at a time they worked out well.
Scaled up this big the tolerances were rather loose on some parts and required a good glue to hold them in place. Gorilla glue works amazingly well on PLA. Other than the removal of the brims and some minor supports, a few ooze twigs, and some stray stings no other post work was required.
My grand-kids love this guy! It makes for a fun attraction. Grandpa dinosaur is a great place to visit!
@Fen11 Actually nearly 3 spools split between the Bone (1,320) for the skeleton and the Gunmetal for the base stand (729) and a good chunk for spare ribs.
Looks great. I made a 1x scale and had a lot of trouble with the ribs as well. I have been planning on trying it bigger, but was hoping bigger pieces would print more easily. I won’t get my hopes up!
Wow, amazing. Hard to believe some of those prints made it without supports. I appreciate how thorough you were with the specs. Something I can learn from
@Dan_Baldwin Thanks! Haha, my electric bill hardly changed. My printers are running nearly all the time so it is just a matter of what is printing on them not that they are printing. Lol!
@Geoffrey_Forest Thanks! In most ways the bigger pieces do print easier, the overhangs have more self support at 0.1mm layers, just takes longer. Now that I’ve done it once I can offer tips on how to get past some of the issues especially with the ribs and the tip of the tail. Use a large brim of 20 lines and have a really flat bed with good leveling.
Nice 1X scale print there! Was that at 0.2mm layers? If you want to do a bigger one then I would encourage you to go for it. It really was a fun project.
@James_Direen Thank you! Yes, watching some of those parts materialize was quite fascinating. The two pieces (upper and lower hips) that I did use supports on didn’t really need them after the fact but I wasn’t sure how they would come out with such flat long overhangs.
Biggest factors to the success of the print was using thermally calibrated filament and having a highly effective part cooling fan duct on the printer.
@mark_warlick By 1:1 do you mean a life size 5 foot long skull? How much what? Weight? Time? Selling price?
I have considered making just the skull using the full Z height of my printer which would produce a 1:4 (quarter scale) head 15" long. The top half alone would take about 200 hours (8+ days) to print with a 0.1mm layer and take one full spool of filament. The jaw would need to be printed on my big printer (12x16) as it would be ~13" long. Estimated print time would be 86 hours and use 422 grams of filament. Still considering…
@Jeff_Parish
I don’t think my Stratasys system would accommodate a whole 1:1 five foot skull. In fact I’m sure it has a 10"x10"x18" limit.
We need a better medium to print with.
Drywall plaster maybe?
@mark_warlick Right, not many printers could handle a 5 foot skull in one piece. To do it on mine I would need to break it up into something like 36 pieces and glue them back together.
Your Stratasys could duplicate this 1:10 scale project…
There are some printers that extrude a clay paste (not great precision yet) and there have been posts in this forum about printer systems based on arms that reach around a central pivot point and ones that mount on the ceiling and floor of a room. With the right combination of technologies, a large format printer using something like quick drying clay just might work.
@Jeff_Parish
The next printer for me will be an Apis, maybe.
Just have to convince my building maintenance colleagues that they need one.
Then maybe we can print a 10:1 skull and move in.
