SO you would assume 3D printing means to download a file from thingiverse, have the wonderful lab technicians to review the file and finish all the setting, finish all your other assignments and come back when everything is finished, nice and clean.

No, this would never happen.

This is the picture of the articulated spider, printed by the file sharer. All eight legs, each has three segments, are all connected using ball-joints and then connected to the two-part body. There are another two pieces, shaped as the fangs. And the abdomen is skull-like.

It looks cool, intimidating and appealing.

However, printing it out was not easy at all. I first tried with the Object 260 printer in the wet lab. Facing the situation that the 1:1 size from the file was too large and too cost-ineffective and knowling very little about what the property of the printing material would be, I shrank the file to about 60% of its original size and chose Tangoblack.

Even though most pieces were printed in a very nice way, the legs of the spider were super thin and delicate. I tried to remove the support stucture using waterject. It turned out to be a very time-consuming job.

Above is one of the larger parts. Almost all support structure were removed.

Since I am still within the budget limitation, I printed another more solid, and sturdy one using the Dimension printer. The pieces did feel more rigid, while for very tiny parts, the printed lines seemed to be messy and not well aligned.

These are the two larger pieces before the supporting structure is removed.

And these are all pieces after the supporting structure has been removed.

Everything was good except that the printing head might have run into the pieces while printing, causing one part of the leg to be broken.

However, when I actually tried to assemble the pieces, I found out there was a problem that I had always overlooked. Shrinking down the file did keep everything still in the relative scale of each other, however, the thickness of material was much more obvious with smaller object than larger ones. So in the end, all ball-joints part were not compatible except for the middle one connecting two body parts. Therefore, my solution was to cut off all some pieces and super glue the legs togerther. In this way, flexibility and aesthetics were sacrificed, but at least I would have a successfully assembled spider.

These two pictures show the stages when I glued the legs onto the spider.

And here is the beauty.

So although I am still super proud of this cute spider, I learned my lesson – 3D printing can be used for delicate objects but the scale to which it is suitable is highly dependent on the printer, the material and the file. Without thinking through all these, I should never just rashly print out a random trial, which would be time-consuming and cost-ineffective.