Spirit of St Louis kit card Famous Planes

Famous Planes

Famous Planes is a set of airplanes in kit cards you have to build. Those are perfect gifts ! You can find the whole collection here 😊 !

Spirit of St Louis

This is another plane for your collection : the incredible Spirit of St Louis, the plane Lindbergh flew to cross the ocean for the fisrt time. The kit is composed of 6 detailed parts. Like all the other planes in the series, it comes as a card from which you have to cut the pieces before putting them together. There are 2 STL files online: "plane.stl" which shows the assembled aircraft and "spirit of st louis" which is the aicraft still on the card. You only need to print the second one.

Printing

Printing is difficult because the aircraft is precise, it requires a slow speed. The design has been optimized for a 0.4mm or 0.2mm nozzle. I changed the strength of the "hooks", now it is very easy to unhook the plane by hand. The plane and the map are medium in size (see pictures), approximately 12cm.  

You can use 0.1 layer height since all important heights are a multiple of 0.1mm. If you go with something different, there might be some tolerances issues.

Tolerances

You can use the “tolerances_test file” to try if the tolerances are okay for your printer. They are all 0.2mm tolerances that work perfectly on my tuned ender 3 without “elephant's foot effect” (if you got that problem, you might run into troubles… 😥).

If you see that the tolerance test is too loose or too tight you can use the “horizontal expansion setting”.

For cura

The setting is called “horizontal expansion” and you can find it in the “shell” section.

For Prusaslicer

The setting is called “XY size compensation" and you can find it in the “expert” tab (please tell me if there is a change with an update since I don't use Slicer).

If the test is too tight you need to use a negative value and a positive if the test is too loose (for exemple : 0.05mm or -0.1mm). 

Happy printing ! 😎