After printing dozens of trees and snowman, I started working on an army of penquins. I gave them a classy teal top hat to go with their tuxedo.
I started printing the bottoms, I decided to do a multi color print here so I wouldn't have to glue on feet. This adds a lot of time and add some plastic waste due to the color swaps. For this particular print, it was about 4 hours for these bottoms with 41 color swaps. After the feet are done, it's all single color from there. This reduces the waste considerably when you are only swapping colors for a few layers. If the color changes persisted all the way up to the top of the model, the costs in time and material would have skyrocketed.
After printing the bottoms, it is off to printing the top portion.
In this case, I printed the body, then the belly as two different prints and super glued the white belly on. This saves a lot of time and material, and is super easy and has no visual artifacts. These penquins are posable, so I am going to use some TPU (rubber filament) to put them together rather than glue the bodies together.
At this point, my cat is exhausted from listening to all the printing and decides to take a nap. Eating treats is exhausting work.
The first wave of penquins are coming together, they look a little weird without eyes, hats, and filament sticking out of their head. I run the TPU through two holes on the bottom and up through two holes on the head and tie it off. I then put some super glue on the tie so I can cut the tpu really close to the knot without worrying about it coming apart.
At this point, they are fully posable, and free standing. I just need to print some hats and eyes.
I thought teal would be a good acent color for the top hats, so I loaded my AMS with some teal and got to printing.
Here you can see a time lapse of the four hats printing.
After putting it all together, we have the first wave of penquins. I super glued one of the eyes in, but I later realized they stay in perfectly without super glue making it a lot easier to put together. I had to glue in the beak though, which is kind a pain when working with small parts.
I'm not sure what I will assign their first task to be, but the next wave I will probably print them 10 at once.
