Eagle Plaque

Summary:

This 3D printed plaque is a perfect way to save a memory of your school, office, or organization! It can lay on a desk in an office space or anywhere in the house. It is 17 cm long, 14.5 cm wide, and 1.5 cm thick.

Lesson Plan and Constraints: 

The objective of this project was to design and create anything of our choice that fits within the build plate that demonstrates effective usage of the Solidworks features. 

Design Changes: 
 

My first design change was to get rid of the excess around the oval of the plaque because there was a lot of unused space and unnecessary complexity.

Another design change was to separate the bodies of the eagle head to be able to color them easier in the slicing software. I ran into an issue where I couldn't cut the section on the right because Solidworks couldn’t understand the bodies I selected. I fixed this issue by using the Convert Entities tool to convert the region into a new sketch and then proceeded to extrude the sketch upwards and cut it again for Solidworks to register it as a new body, which it didn’t do in the first image.

                          BEFORE                                                                                         AFTER

My final design change was to tweak the height of the letters and the height of each layer on the eagle. This was because the slicing software (Orca Slicer) didn't recognize the bodies in the center of the eagle causing those bodies to be unregistered, increasing the height fixed the issue allowing all the bodies to be present.

                                BEFORE

My final design change was to extrude the bodies inside the eagle with the “up to surface” feature turned on because the printer was trying to print the inside body of the eagle with a very thin layer. I was not able to get a final picture but the changes fixed the plaque.