I have a mild obsession with polyhedra. The more complicated, intersecting, stellated, the better. I’ve got a stack of books on building polyhedra from paper, variations on polyhedra… it’s a bit much sometimes. And then I stumbled across two things on Thingiverse:
- Customizers
- A convex polyhedra customizer
I may have lost a few hours to playing with the customizer before I settled on a model and settings. A (fairly) simple truncated icosidecahedron with thin edges.
I wanted a fairly quick print, to get a feel for the quality and strength of the thin edges, but unfortunatley with supports enabled (which is a must with the overhangs and minimal vertical stability) this print still took more than seven hours, even at 0.35mm layers.
Cleanup was also non-trivial, at 40 minutes. It took a scraper, three shapes of files, a clipper, and a good amount of brute force to get all of the support structures off. This kind of model is a fantastic candidate for dissolvable support structures on printers that support multiple filaments during a print. Thankfully the fully printed icosidodecahedron is stronger than it looks, and stood up well to the abuse needed to clean it up.
- Maker: pdragy
- Source: Convex Polyhedra Customizer
- Original License: Creative Commons – Attribution – Share Alike
- Model: Customizable Convex Polyhedra
- Customized Model: Truncated Icosidodecahedron
- GCode: truncated_icodecahedron.gcode
- Material: Hatchbox Red PLA 1.75mm
- Print Date: 2017/09/14
- Print Time: 7 hours 58 minutes
- Slicer: Slic3r PE 1.36.2
- Slice Settings:
- 0.35mm Layers (Fast Print)
- 20% infill, cubic
- Generate Supports
- Supports on Print Bed
- Supports on Structure
- Printer: Prusa i3 mk2