Trout anyone?

[mhackney]

These little guys are 3" long. I'm printing a bunch (school?) (>100) in many colors and a few infill styles to use as giveaways this weekend at the American Museum of Fly Fishing where I'm giving a presentation on my 3D printed fly reel and doing printing demos all day.

[img]http://mhackney.zenfolio.com/img/s7/v15 ... 0987-3.jpg[/img]

Here's the STL if you want to print your own.

Trout-1UP.stl

(106.53 KiB) Downloaded 419 times

[Jimustanguitar]

Looks great, nice design. That will be a knickknack that people will want to go home with!

So somewhat off topic... Printing a large quantity like this is usually a pain, right? I know it is for me. Are there any programs that let you stack multiple parts vertically with rafts or support sandwiched in between? That way you could print multiple copies of whatever you can fill the build plate with without having to start a dozen individual jobs.

[mhackney]

That's an interesting idea. I actually thought about increasing the layer height every 2mm (that's how thick these are) and print say 3cm high. Then I would split the separate units out. I haven't had time to try it but it just might work.

[ZakRabbit]

Looks great, nice design. That will be a knickknack that people will want to go home with!

So somewhat off topic... Printing a large quantity like this is usually a pain, right? I know it is for me. Are there any programs that let you stack multiple parts vertically with rafts or support sandwiched in between? That way you could print multiple copies of whatever you can fill the build plate with without having to start a dozen individual jobs.

Surface finish would be the same top and bottom, I presume, except for the bottom most fish.

[JFettig]

I know you could easily do that in S3D(as much as you love it) just make sure to space them apart far enough so that the support is thick enough to get a utensil in to pick it out.

I like the various infill options you have there

[geneb]

You could stick a neodymium magnet in there as an "eye" and give kids a pole with a steel weight on it. Dunk in, free fish!

g.

[mhackney]

JFettig, see my build thread - I'm using S3D. In fact, most of the pink fish in the bowl are sliced with it. And, actually, only S3D provides the layer control to do what I suggested.

I had an even better idea... use a water soluble layer between the items in the stack. I have some water soluble filament around here. Print them up, drop in water and ta da!

Gene, my wife literally said the same thing over dinner! I need some tiny magnets, or tiny steel rods and a magnet "hook" on the pole. These would be perfect but I can't get them delivered tomorrow. I ordered some up to test. Might be doing this again in the future.

[bubbasnow]

kjmagnetics.com

[mhackney]

Beat me to it bubbasnow! I just edited my post above to a link to kj. I buy all my magnets from them. Just can't get them here before Saturday.

[bubbasnow]

you should hollow out a pocket on the nose, big enough for the magnet, then seal it in with the bottom/top layers

[mhackney]

That would be sneaky but doable. The .1" thick magnet gives me one layer on each side if I keep these at 2mm thick with .2mm layers. I could finagle 2 thinner layers bottom and top with S3D. Start print, wait until almost the last layer, pop in magnets, finish print. I could either use a pause or come up with a creative way to stop things while I insert them.

[IMBoring25]

I just did that with my Mendel to make a new X carriage with captive nuts. The pause command on that machine was crashing the Y axis when I resumed, so I just broke the gcode into multiple files at the desired layers and added move commands to get the head out of the way while I installed the nuts. Then I just launched the next file.

[a.ash]

You don't want magnets in the fish. You want a small piece of steel. With magnets you will just have giant pile of fish stuck together.

Very cool fish.

[Renha]

That would be sneaky but doable. The .1" thick magnet gives me one layer on each side if I keep these at 2mm thick with .2mm layers. I could finagle 2 thinner layers bottom and top with S3D. Start print, wait until almost the last layer, pop in magnets, finish print. I could either use a pause or come up with a creative way to stop things while I insert them.

Neodym magnets could demagnetize at temperatures above 70, you don't want to heat them up

[lightninjay]

Looks great, nice design. That will be a knickknack that people will want to go home with!

So somewhat off topic... Printing a large quantity like this is usually a pain, right? I know it is for me. Are there any programs that let you stack multiple parts vertically with rafts or support sandwiched in between? That way you could print multiple copies of whatever you can fill the build plate with without having to start a dozen individual jobs.

Somebody else mentioned S3D, but Craftware allows this sort of behavior as well, and it's free. You can do it using the custom supports feature similar to S3D's.