Bone Nautilus
Bone Nautilus
Published 2018-01-19T12:59:24+00:00
Math art, organic curiosity, and outright printing headache! And, intentionally so. This design was intended to push the boundaries of what could be achieved with soluble filament and the BCN3D Sigma dual-extrusion printer.
If you want to try this on a single extruder machine, I tip my hat to you! See printing details for suggestions...
SOLUTIONS AND SOLUBILITY!
But back to the Sigma and PVA. Gotta say, I'm mightily impressed! You see, first time through, I tried a partial print with just the interface layers between support and model in soluble, and the result was still hugely problematic - the solid supports were still woven through the structure, even if not bound to the model.
So, for the full print, I did the supports entirely in PVA, and removing them could not have been simpler. An hour or two of soaking, with occasional swooshing through the water, and I was left with a support-free print. Amazing! I hadn't really given enough credit to just how practical soluble supports could be, and now I'm completely converted.
I GUESS SUPPORTS ARE SOMETIMES NEEDED...
That said, I personally try to design to avoid supports in the first place, but a form such as this one gives one no choice in the matter!
PARTING WORDS
This is one where I'm really interested to see results from anyone excited enough to give it a try on their own! Please post photos!
Bahahahaha! This one is tricky. In fact, intentionally so! It needs supports underneath and inside, and the latter are not going to be easy to remove!
My print in the photos was done at 50%, by the way, but scaling doesn't really have any bearing on the difficulty of printing.
So, if you want to print this effectively and easily, soluble supports are the way to go. However, that does require a dual-extrusion system, which not everyone has. What, then, would one do with a single extruder? Basically, design and manually place supports selectively, to minimse the effort in removing them. The rings that form the bulk of the shape shouldn't need support, but the secondary twisting feature certainly will when it's descending from the upper part of the rings. A single support for each low point should handle that. Maybe. Hahaha. Sorry. :D
Have fun!
Date published | 19/01/2018 |
Technology | FDM |
Complexity | Easy |
Cool design, I really like this print