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3d printed desktop toys1/25/2024 The head could then be split in half and internal receiving lugs designed in position to receive the lower beak pivot. The upper part of the beak would be designed to fix directly into the owl’s head, and the lower part designed to have a small internal pivot axle. The same process could be applied to the owl’s eyes, its ear tufts, its breast feathers - you get the idea.Īnd in order to animate the beak, you would need to design both upper and lower parts. The wings, too, could perhaps be separated and designed to fit back into the body once they too had been printed in a different colour. Then, the owl’s talons could be separately designed in order to attach to both the log and to the main body of the owl and printed in another, differently coloured filament. The log could then be printed in its own filament colour. The point here is that the kind of design thinking that has been applied to the Bath Duck could just as successfully be applied to the Makerbot Owl in order to make it a much richer object.įor a start, the log on which the owl stands could be separated in CAD and have some holes introduced to accept the talons of the owl. Children are mesmerised by it and it retails at just £5.99. The Bath Duck, by contrast, is a very simple yet refined object, made up of just three colours - but it floats and its beak opens and closes. The shape itself may be nicely modelled, but as an object produced as a single 3D print, it’s a pretty crude one and ultimately rather uninspiring as a toy. The Makerbot Owl is simply an owl shape, produced in a single colour. As a point of comparison, consider Patrick Ryland’s Bath Duck for Ambi Toys - it’s a classic, simple, injection-moulded bath toy. Representing desktop 3D printing, the famous Makerbot Owl has been used to showcase the company’s hardware for many years now. These principles apply equally to the world of desktop 3D printing, if users of such machines are serious about making their output more sophisticated.īy way of an example, let’s compare two similar plastic toys, one 3D printed and the other assembled from injection-moulded parts. Here, you should identify upfront which parts will be coloured differently and design them as separate elements, so that they can be printed and decorated (with no fiddly and imperfect masking required) before they’re finally brought together as a beautiful finished object. In order to avoid this situation, it makes great sense to design the space out of an object, again by creating multiple parts that can be assembled later.įinally, the same rule applies if you want your finished object to be multi-coloured: break it down. If your object contains a lot of free space, then you’re effectively paying, in time and money, for a 3D printer to ‘make’ you nothing more than fresh air. In order to produce larger objects, these objects need to be designed as a collection of parts that can be assembled once printed.Īnd in the world of industrial 3D printing, breaking down objects into components can also make design and production more affordable. This will create a hole in the top, join this the the main body.Īdd a cube 52 x 52 x 52mm set on the XY plane centred at the origin (0,0), this should be a separate body.įinally combine the two bodies using the cube as the Target Body and the spiral stepped body as the Tooled Body and the operation set as Cut, this will remove it from the cube.They might, for example, run up against limitations in terms of the size of the build chamber on a 3D printer, which dictates the size of objects that can be produced. I added a cylinder of 6mm diameter and 2mm high at the centre of the last rectangular surface. Repeat these steps until you have 25 layers in total. Uncheck Construct in the Sketch Palette menu.Ĭreate a rectangle with 3 points, select the 3 points you constructed, extrude this rectangle to a height of 2mm and select Join in the menu so the the two elements will become one body. This will create three points from where the next surface will be created. Repeat this a further 2 times on separate sides. Start a line from one corner of the top surface with a length of 2mm select a point along one side of the top face. Select Construct in the Sketch Palette menu. Start another Sketch and select the top surface of the previously extruded body as the plane to work on. Start a Sketch using the XY plane, create a rectangle using centre and point, with the centre on the origin (0,0) and a size of 50mm.
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