Printing the airless basketballs at full size works just fine but scaling them down to half size makes them a little bit too weak and difficult to print with a 0,6mm nozzle so I designed my own 120mm ball
It has a lot thicker design with bigger holes giving it the following properties
- Very strong due to very thick structure though not too heavy (100g ball at 120mm and only 20 grams of support)
- Fast printing with less retractions
- Support easy to remove
- Very uniform bounce despite the random voronoi pattern (mostly because there are no thick embossed lines along the surface as with the airless basketballs)
- The overhangs at the top of the print can be a little bit messy but still quite easy to clean up
- There are unavoidedly overhangs in this model which are not supported and are almost impossible to print without so be warned, but the PLA-HR from Biqu really handles it well as you can see in the pictures
My settings (not necessarily the best but I only printed this once):
- 0,6mm nozzle
- 0,18mm layer lines
- max. 40mm speed but slowing down to 15mm/s for overhangs
- 100% cooling on ALL fans (you need all the cooling you can get for the top part)
- 2 walls
- 100% concentric infill
- random seam position
- Print time was 9 hours
- Normal support with 30% treshold (orcaslicer)
- 10mm first layer expansion to prevent lifting from the bed (it's about 10°C in my shed so my prints tend to warp a lot)
- Support blocker from layer 100 and up
- 2 interface layers
- top z distance 0,18mm
- don't support bridges
- support on build plate only
I printed this in Biqu PLA-HR which is known for printing very good airless basketballs so it works perfectly for this. Originally I made this to be printed in Fiberlogy's Fiberflex 40D but I haven't gotten around to it because I'm afraid it won't handle the overhangs at the top
Bigger version is coming soon but I have to redesign because it would be too heavy now at 240mm
Tags
The author marked this model as their own original creation.