Some of you may have read my earlier blog about 3D printing for the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in London (https://www.3dhubs.com/talk/thread/3d-printing-royal-institution-christmas-lectures). That was an opportunity which came about right in the middle of a quite ambitious piece of 3D printing that was to consume most of my December.
In November I was asked by Fuel 3D and Ultimaker to print out five facial scans taken at an event in London, one of which happened to be Sir Tim Berners-Lee the founder of the internet (which was an honour in itself). These were each about 12cm tall, printed in Colorfabb bronzeFill and then polished. They all came out really well (see below) and led to what follows.
Around this time Fuel 3D found out that they’d won a very prestigious Innovation award from CES 2015, and suggested an idea to me of doing something much more ambitious to show on their stand in Las Vegas.
Those who know me will testify that my philosophy is that while I believe 3D printing is a great technology it’s one for which we need to keep finding new applications, and one where we need to keep pushing at the boundaries. The proposal by Fuel 3D was to print out a life-size bronze bust and stand with Stuart Mead their CEO as the subject, and as such it met both criteria.
The technique used was similar to that for the Royal Institution print - a facial scan taken by Andrew Smith with the new Fuel 3D Scanify, and a more general head and shoulders scan taken with a Structure Sensor scanner to keep the overall file size down. The scans were then meshed together, and a stand added, by Stephen Atkinson at Fuel 3D before the file came to me for printing in early December.
Due to the size of the final printed model it required a lot of splitting for printing on my Ultimaker 2. The head and shoulders were ultimately printed in 16 separate sections and took almost 92 hours of print time in total. Everything was printed at 100 microns layer height except the front facial part, which was printed at 80 microns for slightly better definition.
The stand was also printed in bronzeFill, but only as a 0.8mm thick shell which was then reinforced by two solid wood blocks inside to bear the weight of the 2.3kg print sitting on top of it. This still probably consumed around another 14 hours of printing time though.
The stand was finally enhanced with the Fuel 3D logo, a Stuart Mead nameplate, and an inscription on the back, all of which were 3D printed in bronzeFill and then polished. These were all made off JPEGs (which is one of the really cool features of Cura, the ward-winning open source slicing software developed by Ultimaker).
In addition to the printing there were hours of file preparation to split the model for slicing and printing in the most efficient way, not to mention the time spent assembling the parts and dressing the joints. The final model split is shown here.
The final polish was achieved using a combination of a stainless steel pan scourer, very fine grade wet and dry abrasive paper, and finally a liquid metal polish (in this case Brasso).
In total there was almost 2.7 kgs of bronzeFill used in this model, so my 10% ColorFabb discount through 3D Hubs really did come in very handy!
The project seemed to be never-ending, especially in the days between Christmas Day and the New Year, but when I “dry-assembled” the whole print on New Year’s Eve and stood back from it I realised that I had created something special.
It’s not perfect, most of the joints are very well matched but not invisible close-up, and some are better than others (I tried to push any errors to the back side of the model) and there’s also a spot repair in one place that‘s quite visible. But like anything you do for the first time you learn a lot from the experience and build on that for future projects. For instance, I learned in this project that a soldering iron is a perfect implement to spot-repair (with care) any small errors in a bronzeFill print.
I hope some of you may get a chance to see it at CES 2015 International on the Fuel 3D Stand #71617, if so let me know what you think.
My final summary of this project…"A full-size bronze bust produced without a foundry in sight, maybe that’s why 3D Printing really could be the next Industrial Revolution!!”
Thanks for reading…… Steve from the Birmingham Hub
