3D Printing a knight

June 21, 2016

Over the weekend, I printed out the parts for the servo activated knight. It is designed to be glue together but I’ve made the parts a sliding fit. See GitHub for the models.

3D printing the parts

There were a few issues along the way:

The hole in the feet was a little small for the header plug of the servo, so I’ve fine tuned the model with a larger hole. Also the screw hole for the feet gets quite close to the top of the foot. This should resolve itself when the foot is painted. The legs otherwise printed well and fit into the body, they do move about a little because of the shape. I’ve fine tuned the top of the legs so that there is a parallel section which should lead to easier attachment.

The body also printed well. I’d managed to miss part of the servo so had to fix this with a rat tail file. Again I’ve fixed up the model. The servo fits into the body well and the wiring has space too. If anything the fit it a bit slack and I may add some foam to stop it from rattling about. I printed the shield with supports and then trimmed them off after it had printed. The front surface of the shield was a bit rough so I used some fine interior filler and sanded it back.

The head printed without issue and is a good fit for the neck. I design and printed an LED carrier to slot inside the head and that also printed without issue.

I’m quite happy with the arms and sword, although the hole and counter bore could have been neater. I’ll see what those look like with a screw in place to determine if they need reprinting.

None of these issues seems to warrant a reprint at this time as the problems should not be visible in the finished knight.

Next up is priming and then painting. I’ve some white plastic primer for the base coat and some red car spray paint for the St George cross on the shield. I need to source some suitable silver paint for the armour, one friend suggested Hammerite as that has a nice hammered effect which could be effective.

Printed Knight

By Andy from Workshopshed One Comment

  Posted in: Dragon Detector Tags: 3d Printing