3D Printed Articulated Dinosaur


One of the first projects I saved to my "Things to Make" folder on Thingiverse when we got our 3D Printer was this cute little dinosaur. I finally got around to making "Flexi Rex" this week, so I thought I'd share him with you and show you what kinds of little problems can sometimes come up when 3D printing.


I printed Flexi Rex using the recommended settings (.2 resolution, 15% infil) using some blue PLA. This print was really hard to see while it was printing because the dinosaur is only slightly bigger than the print head. I saw some extra plastic along the top, but since, at the time I checked on it, it was printing well, I let it go.


It looked pretty good once it had finished printing, aside from the excess plastic on its spine. When I peeled the dinosaur off the print bed, I could see what happened. One of the sections of the dinosaur (the arm) dislodged/came unstuck from the print bed after it had printed the base layer, but it fortunately didn't interfere with the rest of the print, so it kept going without becoming a catastrophic failure.


This is a pretty typical small issue when printing with a 3D printer. If you can babysit the first couple layers of the print, you can sometimes catch it early enough to restart the print project, but sometimes things just get a bit bungled. This dinosaur still looks great from one side, he just has a bit of a limb difference on the other side.


I went ahead and printed a second dinosaur. I sprayed a little bit of hairspray on the glass print bed to try to help with bed adhesion so everything would stay stuck where it was supposed to while printing, and it worked perfectly. The second print turned out just as it should.


This is a cute and simple print, assuming it sticks to your print bed. The print only takes a couple of hours and the finished project is cute and sturdy!

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