DrLex – “Flexi Rex With Stronger Links”
While browsing through Thingiverse, I came across this intriguing design of a dinosaur. Its intricacy worried me a bit, but I was very excited to try to print it. After downloading it, I surprisingly had very little trouble getting a finished product. However, there were still things that lacked from the print.
Design Overview
Fig. 1 – SLA Printed Flexi Rex
The “Flexi Rex” is a 3D modeled dinosaur made by user DrLex on Thingiverse which cleverly creates a T-Rex figure using several linking pieces. I made 5 different prints total, which included 4 FFF prints (white to imitate dinosaur bones) and a single SLA print (see fig. 1). Each of the prints were scaled down to 58% of the original size in order to fit the size constraints.
The Pros
Overall I was very happy with how the prints came out. Firstly, none of the prints were affected by the scaling that was needed. Each print was still able to maintain the detail that was in the initial Thingiverse post. Also, true to its name, the Flexi Rex prints are all flexible (see fig. 2). I was very happy to see that the print turned out this way, as I was worried about the prints becoming stiff due to it being 58% the size of the original design.
Fig. 2 – Flexibility of Flexi Rex Prints
What Could Have Been Better
Fig. 3 – Right-sided print has cut on tail
There were also a couple of flaws I found in the design. Luckily they occurred in individual prints and only happened once. The first of these is a problem with the tail in one of the FFF prints. The tail unfortunately split and was not able to print correctly (see fig. 3). Also, the SLA print, although very detailed, showed signs of peeling very quickly in the teeth area (see fig. 4). This may have been due to improper removal of supports, which can be corrected next time around.
Fig. 4 – SLA Print Peeling
Print Cost
Each of the FFF prints were made up of 4.61 g of PLA filament, which has a cost of $0.09, and took a total of 43 minutes. This means that the 4 prints, used 18.44 g of PLA filament, with a cost of $0.36, and took a total of 172 minutes.
The single SLA print used 1.93 ml for the supports and 4.38 ml for the dinosaur. In addition to this, it had a total print time of 14 minutes. Taking an average of $50/L of resin as the price for the 6.31 ml of resin used, the total cost would be $0.32.
I put in approximately 3 hours of labor into the project, which includes time to find, download, and scale the print as well as time to monitor the print and solve any problems that came up. If I value my labor at minimum wage ($7.25), the total cost of labor is $21.75.
The cost of running each of the printers per hour is about $0.09, so the total run time has a cost of $0.28.
In summary, the total cost of doing 4 FFF prints and 1 SLA print of the Flexi Rex is:
$0.36 + $0.32 + $21.75 + $0.28 = $22.71
