I’ve always been interested in abstract sculptures, particularly wireframe sculptures that caged something. Accordingly, I chose this sculpture and printed it in FDM and SLA through the Prusa printer and Form3D respectively

The .stl file was uploaded to Prusa, scaled to size as estimated through a caliper with the gumball case and printed in PLA. This FDM version was challenging to deal with. The structure printed properly, however, the internal ball necessitated internal supports that were incredibly difficult to remove without damaging the structure which had fragile tendrils. The first individual print took 1 hour and 34 minutes and the results are depicted in the bottom left. The annoying part was removing all the supports. While cutting on the inside and twisting off the exterior supports, I would often snap off a tendril by mistake. The image on the right shows one of the attempts where the entire piece snapped in two.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seeing this, I began to print in batches; I did not have 20 hours to print one at a time only to have them fail and restart again. Each print became 3 hours and 45 minutes for 5 pieces and I ended up choosing 4 out of the 11 total prints. The trick in the end is to focus on cutting the supports into tiny pieces instead of trying to extract a clean section. The image on the left is a previsualization in the PrusaSlicer and the right shows the final product. Post-processing took an entire 7 minutes for each individual piece.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the other hand, I loved SLA. The Form3D system was incredibly intuitive. Using the default settings, I rotated and suspended the print for a clean edge, used the autogenerated supports as well as some additional ones for print stability, and sent it to the printer. The default settings must have a lower layering height because simply printing one took a total of 4 hours and 17 minutes, much longer than the Prusa. It paid off though because the final product after washing, support trimming, and finally curing was much smoother and durable than the FDM print.

The cost estimate is for 4 FDM prints and 1 SLA print.

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	PLA	$29.99/kg	prusa3d.com	12.35 g	$0.37
	Grey Pro Resin	$199/L	formlabs.com	10 mL	$1.99
Labor	Printer Technician	$20.31/h	salary.com	8 h	$162.48
	Prototyping engineer	$38/h	ziprecruiter	15 min	$9.5
Overhead	FDM Printer	$0.21/h	Prusa forum community	4 h	$0.84
	SLA Printer	$10/h	Formlabs forum	4 h	$40
Design	Thingiverse	$0	Thingiverse.com	5	$0
Total					$215.18

Hopefully the printer technician would be monitoring more than just this one batch in a scaled-up setting.