Another whimsical/joke print

My wife is currently being fitted for dental implants. When we were last at the prosthodontist’s office, the subject of 3D printing came up (no, I didn’t bring it up). He seemed intrigued by it. Then, while perusing thingiverse.com, which I do occasionally, I spied this: [U]https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3741674.[/U]
I immediately thought of the prosthodontist & decided to surprise him. Soooo,

[ATTACH=JSON]{“data-align”:“none”,“data-size”:“medium”,“data-attachmentid”:5783}[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=JSON]{“data-align”:“none”,“data-size”:“custom”,“height”:“328”,“width”:“340”,“data-attachmentid”:5784}[/ATTACH]

Now, I have to tell you, this has been the most difficult thing I’ve ever printed. What you see here is either the 5th or 6th attempt. I tried without support of any kind. The roots broke free from the table before they were an inch high. I added small supports around the legs, similar to the ones you see in the left photo. The roots again broke free. I zoomed in really closely in Cura and could see that the supports didn’t actually touch the roots.

I decided it was time for some research. That’s how I found out about the XY Support Distance feature of Cura. I played with the values and finally got to a point where the supports were either in contact with the roots or very, very close to them. I then decided not to take any chances, so I added a raft as well. And, it worked. Yay.

So, when we next visit the prosthodontist, I’ll give him the vase (or whatever you want to call it). I look forward to watching his face :slight_smile:

I like that kind of creativity.

Yep! I discovered that the XY Support Distance is really important for debugging support problems as mentioned in the thread where we discussed my support issues printing the Baby Yoda eyes. I’ve had a couple of situations where the default XY Support Distance settings caused my prints to fail. If supports fail, one of the first things to try to prioritize Z-distance over XY-distance.

Nicely done! I’ve certainly had fun to get folks to laugh over my 3D printing ventures.

Ender 5r is really getting i nto this. @Ender5r

That discussion became part of my research and I used it as a jumping off point to searching for other info on supports. I haven’t done much with supports because I try to avoid them whenever I can. This model is 1 that just won’t print well without supports.

It’s very clever.