In a last minute bid to not let the week pass without a print, I downloaded and printed a model of the week’s latest meme, #LeftShark. This print has taught me a valuable lesson, Less haste = Less waste.
It’s been chaos in the Tailor3d house for the past three weeks. All four of us have been sick at one time or another and we’re only now emerging from the fog of it all. Did you know there are viruses out there that’ll give your kids a fever for nine days straight! That’s meant almost three weeks with barely any hours for work; “Sorry boss, the kids are too sick for Kindy, can it wait?” Needless to say my printing ambitions were suitably curtailed too.
So after defeating my own brood of bugs and starting to feel better today, I wanted to see a new print from my machine. What better way to overcome the sickness blues, than by printing the adorable and slightly uncoordinated Left Shark from Katy Perry’s half time performance at last week’s Super Bowl. Click here for a sample of his exploits, or here for the full show, including an impressive entrance on a low poly lion. Printing this little model has the added appeal of civil disobedience thanks to Katy Perry’s lawyers trying to thwart Fernando Sosa aka mstyle183 from selling his version of Left Shark on Shapeways. For now, you can still download the file from Thingiverse here.
As you can see, Left Shark is mostly blue and white with some black highlights, but the file is just a single print so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to print something wit the intention of painting it. I first saw painted 3D prints when I saw the presentation by April Staines from Girl Geek Academy at last year’s Inside 3D Printing show in Melbourne. She makes Cosplay props with her 3D printers and then paints them to create impressive props. I’d like to figure out how it’s all done and see if I can achieve a high quality finish, but that’s another story for another day.
I feel like I should be posting this on Pintrest with an ironic #NailedIt. This print was cute, but ultimately a fail. A hairy fail. What happened? the supports fell over, then when it was supposed to print supports, it printed random hair and because the supports weren’t there, the overhang on the dorsal fin didn’t print.
Why? now that’s a bigger question. It could have been caused by a number of things. The list of my misdeeds includes but probably isn’t limited to;
- Dirty Print Bed, it was a little dusty on later inspection. If I hadn’t been in such a rush I would have wiped it clean.
- Frizzy filament, for all my wise warnings to myself about humidity, I left my ABS on the machine for the last fortnight. I’ll say it was an experiment to see what really happens to humidified filament, but it was probably just down to forgetting about it.
- Supports that were too thin. I’m not sure how to customise this yet, but it must be fixable.
- Printer on the dinner table. In the haze of illness, we’ve not yet moved the printer from its spot on the dinner table to it’s new home in the office. The table seems to wobble a bit during prints (a minor discomfort if you’re also eating dinner). It’s new home in the office should be much more stable.
All things which can be fixed with time and effort. Next time.
For now I’ll leave you with the entertaining pics of my hairy fail shark.
Enjoy
Tailor3d 
Thanks alot – your answer solved all my problems after several days stggruling
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