Despite being heavily involved in the 3D printing field now, it’s only been about 2 years since I saw my first 3D printer and a little less than that since I’ve started printing my own works. A lot of the time, I use my printers to fulfill function requirements that I may need on a day-to-day basis - essentially replacing the items you’d keep in your junk drawer with on-demand, disposable versions. When I’m not using my printers for functional purposes, I like to use them for aesthetic prints, producing artwork and nice-looking models.

I’ve always been fond of architecture and having a 3D printer lets me produce my own versions of my favorite buildings and sculptures to keep on display. The topographical and architectural models for the most part pose few challenges, since these models are inherently structurally sound (otherwise they’d collapse). Printing with ABS can always be a bit of a struggle due to warping, though, and I’ve found heating the bed above the recommended 110C to 125C goes a long way towards preventing that. For other models I work with, finding a good orientation that can minimize support and produce the strongest structure possible is typically what I aim for.

Here’s the printing info:

Printer Model:

  • for the topographical models, I used the Duplicator 4X and Replicator 2X. Both printers printed with a nozzle temperature of 230C and a bed temperature of 125C. Speed was the standard 90mm/s and 150mm/s and layer height was 0.3mm. The nozzle dimeter was 0.35mm, I believe.
  • for the city print, I used the Stratasys Prodigy Plus, which also prints at 230C, I believe and uses a heated chamber rather than a heated plate (I think the chamber gets up to around 70C). I’m not sure what the speeds or nozzle diameters are, but the layer height is around 0.18mm.

Filament:

  • both printers used ABS filament of 1.75mm diameter. Infill for all the models is close to 10% as well, albeit the Prodigy uses a completely different infill scheme than the MakerBot and Duplicator. The models on the Replicator and Duplicator didn’t need any support material and the Prodigy only needed the support material raft it uses for all prints (it typically defaults to support material for the entire model as well, since it is a more plug-and-play solution than a desktop printer).

Software:

  • most of those models were just downloaded from Thingiverse or other similar websites. My primary modeling software is SolidWorks, although I have also messed around with such software as Blender, SketchUp, MeshMixer, TinkerCAD, and an assortment of other systems - my workflow is often very case-specific depending on where the model is coming from.

Print time:

  • The topographical prints on the Replicator and Duplicator took around 2 hours to complete
  • The cityscape from the Prodigy took around 11 hours to complete, being a much larger print and coming from a slightly slower printer.

Relevant links:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:33301

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:25082

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12762

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Really cool! Thanks for sharing :slight_smile: