Sunday project: printing a house!

One of the things that were on my list of things to try with the 3D printer was something from Minecraft. Today I did the first attempt, and it was a great success.

I built this quickly just to have a test print

I used the Mineways export software to select my house from the Minecraft world. It has really good configuration for the exported model. I chose a block height of 2mm for this house, and exported to STL which I then sliced normally.

Selecting the box to print is quite simple using Mineways

The print itself took about an hour with ABS plastic, and it's surprisingly cool looking. I guess the only thing to do now is to build something cooler than a 5 minute house, and see how it turns out!

The finished result

More fun with the 3d printer

So I'm still in the process of playing with my printrbot simple metal, and figuring out what its limits are. I'm still getting some bad prints with the ABS, but as long as I remember to clean the bed and re-apply the hairspray between prints, things are good.

Yesterday I made a couple of joke-badges for me and a co-worker. The design was fairly simple, but I also experimented with paining the prints, with what I consider a moderate success. There's still something to be said for fine tuning the finish (possibly smoothing with acetone), but it still looks pretty cool.

A couple of fun badges

I also printed a couple of other test objects from Thingiverse, and this AngularJS keychain by Kim Gressens. In lack of red filament, I painted the red part of the chain.

Pieces before assembly. I had to scale the outter ring slightly up in Slic3r to make them snap properly together

The finished AngularJS keychain