My wife placed an order for dozens of Christmas trees, snowman, and other Christmas 3D prints. My 3D printer has been running pretty much non-stop for the last 3 weeks. For the first time I have gone through a single spool of filament in less than 24 hour window.
The primary thing I have been printing is these artistic Christmas trees in various sizes along with a mini snowman to create little dioramas for friends and family.
We picked up these wood trays and I printed trees for each of them, along with a colorful snowman. We have two scenes, one with three trees and one with five with one being lite up with a flickering tea light battery powered candle.
You can't really see the lighting effect, but it looks pretty cool at night.
The snowman were pretty annoying to build as they require super glue to glue all the parts together and the eyes and buttons are pretty difficult to line up. I could have printed them in one go, but they take a lot longer and require a lot more filament to print. I would also have had to print supports to hold up the arms while printing. I ended up printing the various pieces in batches of ten. The original model is designed to be put together with an elastic so you can pose and position them, but I decided to super glue them to a fixed position.
I also printed some new snowflakes for the Christmas tree for a few friends as well as our own tree.
All these models are freely available, and can just be downloaded and printed.
One of the awesome things about 3D printing is most of the models are freely available and filament is pretty cheap, a lot cheaper than printer ink. I typically get a 2.2lbs (1kg) spool for $11 - $20 and most models are 5g-50g. It's a very rewarding hobby that is cheaper than you might expect. While I personally prefer functional prints (prints that solve a problem in my life) but during the holidays I typically print a lot of statues and decorations.
My favorite print this holiday though are giant snowman. I've been blowing through filament printing these as they each take almost an entire spool on their own.
One of the fun things about these snowman is you can customize them. You can choose to use a scarf or a sweater, each can be printed in any color you want. You can use button or coal eyes as well as customizing the buttons. There is a wooly hat and a fancy top hat, although you can take other hats and resize them and modify them to work on this model as well. The arms are optional and I think they look good with and without the arms.
You can even just print the head and body and skip the bottom making a smaller but equally cute snowman. The bottom takes up 300g (1/3rd a spool) of filament is about 9 hours on a high speed printer. Most printers will take 2-3 times that long to print it.
This is totally doable with only the head and body, but I'd recommend putting buttons on, this was one of the earlier pictures while I was printing the first one.
This model is completely free as well, and can be downloaded and printed for free.
I made these giant snowman completely posable rather than glueing them, due to the size, it was a bit more managable to put them together. Although it is still a big pain as you got to screw two bolts in to a floating plate where you can't really hold it in place as you can't fit your arms in the bottom hole.
A full size giant snowman with all accessories takes around 20 hours to print on my printer and just under 1000g (1 spool or 2.2 lbs of plastic) of filament. The total cost to make one of these is roughly $12 between electricity and filament costs. They are super popular and could easily sell for $50+ if I was to put them up for sale.
This year I printed a lot of gifts like this amazing zebra print for a friend who loves zebras, and some Star Wars shadow boxes.
Even 3D printing some mechanical gift boxes for gift cards.
If you are interested in 3D printing, expect to spend $100-$1,500 on a printer, with most good printers starting around $500 and a printer like mine running around $1,500. Generally most printers can print similar results, but the more you spend the fewer problems you have and the more consistency you can expect. The Ender 3 is a very popular printer that can be had for $100-300 but is plagued with reliability issues, but is a very capable printer when working well.
I use a Bambu X1C w/ AMS (multi color unit). It cost me $1,500 and allows me to print up to 16 colors in a single print. Although I only have one AMS unit which limits me to four colors and I usually only print one color at a time, and just glue pieces together. Although I will do multi color prints when it doesn't require hundreds of color swaps like these.
There are a lot of clever tricks you can do with 3D printing, like this coaster was printed on a textured plate faced down to give it a textured look, the giant snowman I printed with fuzzy skin to give it a snow like finish. You can even print unique materials like wood, carbon fiber, glow in the dark, and so on.
Damn, those looks nice! :D
Now I want a 3D printer xD
I do like the idea of the 3d printer. It's the sort of thing you could share between a few people to do all the little jobs you need. I may look into it next year.
Merry Christmas.
Very cool.👍🏻
This is definitely an interesting Hobby. Is plastic the only option or can we also use eco-friendly raw materials?
I did a quick Google to find out that we can use PLA (Polylactic Acid) which I guess is bio-friendly.
PLA is the most common material, but it is only suitable for indoor use. In the sun, it can warp and melt. Outdoors, or higher temp requirements you will usually want to use PETG, ABS, ASA. ABS is what most common commercial plastic products are made of, but it is fairly toxic to print, but prints really well. ASA is kind of a safer replacement of ABS for 3D printing. PETG is like PLA, but better heat resistance but still safe to print. PLA is basically made from corn and generally very safe to print just doesn't handle heat well, like it will warp a little in a car on a summer day. You can also print some more intense things like Nylon and Polycarbonate which are very strong.
It looks very cool, and I love those wooden trays with the Christmas trees and snowmen. The snowmen are so adorable. How many things do you make out of one filament on average?
One spool of filament is 1000kg, and most things are 5g-50g. So usually quite a bit. For example, the small snowman take up about 40g of filament. I could probably make 20-25 of them on a single spool of $11-20 filament.
I love those Christmas trees, they would make lovely table decorations for dinner.
My hubby mentioned about getting a 3D printer a while ago - typical bloke he likes his gadgets - but he hasn't bought up the subject again recently. Maybe I'll give him a little nudge, and get him to print some cute stuff for me.
Merry Christmas!!
The trees might work nicely with fruit and bakeries.
These 3D works are wonderful! The snowman is amazing
I have owned a dozen or so printers from an original Mendel that I built to a Markforged Printer. The only printer I have ever had or used that felt like an appliance is the X1C. It is shaking up the industry and I can't wait to see what comes of it.
It's a great machine, it really changed the ecosystem. Prusa was sitting on their high horse with their while stable, super overpriced simple printers.
I just had a passing thought. Right now the main sharing sites are owned and controlled by manufacturers Prusa & Utlimaker. If we implemented file sharing into our blog frontends using IPFS we could have a decent shot at bringing those users here.
Thingiverse (Ultimaker) is dying, Printables (Prusa) is doing very well and is my favorite site. Bambu just released MakerWorld which is a clone of Prusa but it is going to be very hard to unseat Printables as the goto site.
When I first got on Hive, one of the first things I wanted to build is a blockchain version of thingiverse, but ultimately I felt it just wouldn't work out.