I picked this lovely model as a birthday present for my brother. After several tries of printing it with our Prusa i3 MK3 it turned out that we were using the wrong printer as it was desinged for a resin printer.
However, I didn´t want to give up that easy.
The main problems I was facing were that some parts seemed to be unprintable. They either didn´t come out at all or they just snapped in half when I was trying to remove the supporting structures. (Image 1)
So I tried some more and came up with the following solutions:
1. I tried to print everything with the slowest setting of speed possible. This made a lot of the details pop out more. And as most of the parts only took up minutes to print, it wasn´t that big a problem to double the time.
2. I increased the size of some of the parts by 10%. It didn´t show at all when I put it all together in the end.
3. I uploaded the top valve into a program called "Tinkercad", which allowed me to thicken the material manually before downloading it and putting it in the Slicer again.
4. Some of the parts seemed unprintable, such as the small valves and some tips. So I just cut them off in our Slicer. The valves were increased in size again and printed out and glued on seperately.
5. Some parts I had to cut into its components in our Slicer. (Image 2) It seemed impossible to print it and get it out of the supporting structures in one piece. That really was a game changer. The details came out beautifully and the pieces were easy to handle. The only disadvantage: I had to glue it back togehter again!
I wasn´t really happy about how the pipes turned out. The printer was completely overwhelmed by all those curves and roundings so that the filament dragged threads. But a lick of paint covered that up allright.
Gluing it all together turned out to be a game of patience. Of course everything sticked to everything except the pieces I wanted it to. I used casual superglue. And it turns out that even if the description of the glue doesn´t say anything about it not being able to be used on PLA filament, it sometimes still does dissolve the material. So, always check the glue on a spare piece.
All in all I am rather happy with how it turned out. I changed about some of the visuals as it seemed fit in the moment, but it looks way better than I expected it to be in the beginning. The details of the model are stunning and I bet with the right printer it would be 10 times better than my model. My brother was happy about that present and I realized: I won´t do this on a regular basis! ;)
Thank you for putting such a lovely design online.
Kind regards
Jessica
