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LeFabShop's Eiffel Tower printing without support
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Finished tower is about 6cm high
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) recently announced that the TCT + Personalize sponsored 3D Printing TechZone at International CES was set to double in size for CES 2015 owing to the great success of this year’s event.
In the run up to the main event in Las Vegas CEA are running CES Unveiled in a host of locations throughout the globe. CES Unveiled Paris on October 22nd will be a significant stop on this whirlwind tour for TCT as we lug the team over to show our Parisian pals our 3D printing knowledge.
One Parisian outfit that needs no introduction to the technology is LeFabShop, famed for their Seaweed filament and in-car 3D printing. The Bureua-cum-reseller is one of the most active movers and shakers in the maker movement and their designs on Thingiverse are most excellent.
In honour of leFabShop and CES Unveiled Paris we’ve decided to pick one of their designs out to print for ThingiThursday, and we've picked a print that will no doubt encourage yawns from some of the more active makers out there but there is a twist to this print.
One of leFabShop’s collections on Thingiverse is a brilliant selection of Parisian buildings including; The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Pyramid, the Madeleine Church, Arc de Triomphe, The Sacre-Coeur Basilica and Notre-Dame Cathedral; all designed to be printed at home, without the use of support. Of course we decided to print the Eiffel Tower, what else?
Without taking the “no support required” message into account I decided to print the model at original scale, at 0.15mm and on the fine setting, it took 44 minutes but what I ended up with was a mess of support and a decidedly crooked spire. Trial and error this 3D printing lark…
Amazingly, in all the time I’ve been running the UP! Plus in the office there hasn’t been an occasion when I have printed without support, in fact I was unaware how you even deselected support. So, as per usual, the only place to turn was the pp3dp forum where I learnt that the removal of support has only been implemented since version 2.0 of the UP! software.
To turn the support off, certainly in the Mac version, you have to enter “Setup” and under the support section is a drop-down labelled “Area >:” in that list is an option that says “Only Base”, selecting this should mean that you’re only printing the raft and not internal support.
I also read in the comments section of the Thingiverse data that printing multiple Eiffel Towers would prevent the hot-end from warping the spire as it moves back and forth to each print, however seeing as I’d wasted the afternoon with attempt number one I decided to take the theory of hot-end warping and apply my own solution.
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Starting with scaling the model up by 40% - the previous model was a touch on small side and details were lost even on highest quality settings – I paused the printer as it got half way up the spire, allowing the model to cool and set as well as opening the motor fan flap and turn on a desk fan to keep the model cool as it progressed up the Z Axis.
The end result is pretty nifty aside for some minor scorch marks, which seems almost unavoidable and more obvious when printing in white ABS. We might print the whole set for CES Unveiled Paris in some sort of mawkish tribute to their wonderful architecture.
