PETG dinosaur skull aquarium cave

Om jobbet

Printed in PETG as an aquarium centerpiece for a customer who wanted the open jaw to double as a fish cave. The model came in from the customer ready to print, but in preprocessing we noticed several issues in and around the teeth likely because it wasn't designed for FDM 3D printing.

We ran it in Formware's autorepair tool to fix the non-manifold edges inside the model but automatic repair could only do so much on fairly dynamic model geometry. The problem was that printed, some or many teeth would have cavities(hehe) behind them where they would attach to the jaw, making some brittle and may fall out. One option was to fix the model mesh by hand but before doing that we asked the customer and walked them through the options.

The response was that, imperfections and teeth falling out actually added to the "old dino head" feel of the model the customer was going for. The ones that should stay put would be glued in place with aquarium safe glue.

A good reminder that what a manufacturer might flag as a defect can sometimes be exactly what someone wants and treasures can be had in "obvious" errors too.

Print profile: 0.2mm layer height, 40% gyroid infill, 3 wall layers, 50% slower speed for details.