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Hello everyone!

I am a complete noob in 3d printing. For a personal project I was wondering what way (low cost) I could a 3d print a simple chemical structure in color.

I originally generated a .stl file for a non-color version, but was told that to print in color I had to “split” the molecule into individual balls and sticks.

Any ideas? Thank you so much.

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It depends alot on your design.

Can you provide the STL for a better understanding? Or at least inform what is the overall dimension, what is the diameter of the “balls” and the dimension of the “sticks”.

My sugestion is to print the individual “balls” and “sticks” as individual components in what color you want and then assemble and glue them. From design point of view, you need to make the “sticks” longer and the “balls” with holes for the extra “stick” length to go inside and assemble.

Also, depending on the actual design of the molecule, this way of making individual components print separatelly can make the printing easier.

Another advantage would be to just assemble the individual componets, but not glue them and print alot of them. This way you can assemble diffrent molecules.

You can add also the text with the chemical component on the individual ball and make them diffrent sizes depending on the weigth of the atom.

Hope this helps.

3

Hi

Is there a reason you want to 3D print this? You can buy multi-coloured “ball and stick” chemistry molecule kits for about £20 (depending on how many balls and sticks you want). If you’re going to 3D print the parts then assemble it yourself, it would be easier and cheaper to assemble the pre-made parts (the tolerances and so fit, will be much better than parts made by FDM).

If you want to 3D print it as one structure, I can help. If you submit the non-colour stl version to my hub (https://www.3dhubs.com/service/oxfordrapidproto) I’ll give you a quote. I can do up to 55 different colours all in one 3D printed part. You will eventually need an stl for each colour (or each part if you do want to print them as separate parts) but I can help with that.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Rachel