introduction

This project truly tested my abilities to 3D print in a constructive way! I had plenty of experience with the regular Prusa printers in FDM PLA. However, my exposure to SLA resin printers was very limited. Overall, the project showed me the difficulties of sizing down and parts fusing together.

process

First, I selected the piece I wanted. I love elephants and saw this piece on social media a while ago. I found a similar piece on Thingiverse and ran with it.

FDM PLA

I printed the first piece with no edits to see how it came out. The shape was smooth and moved very well. I loved the detail in the trunk!

 

However, these friendly giants did not fit in the gumball machine container. Therefore, I scaled the elephant down to 50% of its original size. Although this did fix the size issue, two new issues arose. The legs were very diffiult to move and the great trunk design kept breaking off due to the thinness of the trunk.

 

 

 

The next step I took was to scale it up to 65% size. This addressed the legs moving issue but the trunk breaking issue kept on persisting. I realized as I used the raft adhesion, the grip was too strong to mitigate the damage to the trunk.  Additionally, I tried using a skirt and a brim adhesion. Both resulted in failing prints.

 

 

 

Realizing I couldn’t skip the raft adhesion, I decided to address the elephant in the room and look at the trunk. I tackled trying to edit the file itself to reduce the length of the trunk. Could I have thickened the trunk to make it stronger? Yes, but a.) it wouldn’t look as cool b.) I didn’t think of it at the time, and c.) short trunk looks adorable. I tried importing the .stl file from Thingiverse to Solidworks as a solid body (this took a lot of Googling) but could never get it to be more than a surface because the original .stl file had too many facets (~120k). Basically, there were so many individual faces on the .stl file, Solidworks did not have the capacity to fuse them all together and make a solid part. After a couple of hours of struggling through Google for a solution, I found a suggestion to simply reduce the number of facets using the Decimate Mesh tool. That reduced it down to ~26k facets and was able to be imported as a solid body while keeping all of the same features. I then cut out part of the trunk.

 

 

With this edit, the elephant printed well at 65% scale, had moving parts, and a non broken trunk.

 

 

SLA Resin

When using the SLA Resin printers, the process is similar to the FDM PLA printers, just using a different program.

 

I uploaded my file, scaled it to 65%, and auto generated supports. I printed the elephant completely flat and did not adjust the settings on the printers. Once the print was done, the quality was superb. The supports did their job and everything went well. I washed it for 15 minutes and cured it for another 15 as recommended. Then the legs didn’t move. Sad. I tried a trick from FDM PLA where I grabbed some

pliers and jiggled the legs towards position. I broke their leg. After a quick moment of panic and supergluing, I decided to investigate the reason for this fusion of the entire body.

 

 

I found a helpful video that talked about exposure time. Exposure time is the duration of time the light source is emitting UV light to cure resin per sliced layer. Overexposure can cause pieces to fuse together. Considering I did not adjust the settings, this most likely led to my print error.

 

 

reflection

 

Overall, I was very proud of the results of this print. I loved the detail the Resin print had and I liked the movement the PLA print had. Next time, I would take more time to play with the settings on the SLA Resin Printer to have the part function as it should. Great time working on this!

 

final cost

SLA and FDM Printers: $0 (OEDK Provided)

PLA and Resin: ~ $4 with all the prints

Time: $182 (14 Hours @ $13 an Hour)

Total Costs: $186