With the 2016 school year drawing to a close my daughter and I were looking for something interesting and fun to give out to her classmates with their Christmas cards.
As further evidence of the fact that 3D Printing is Awesome I give you...
...the 3D-printed Build Your Own Snowman kit!
This clever little model was created by the people at Makerbot and made available for free download on Thingiverse.
Having run out of white PLA filament printing the Yuletide Staff of Festivity for Enstaved I decided to have another go at printing with a roll of white ABS I picked up a while back but ultimately gave up on.
Employing the excellent ABS Puck Method I managed to get solid adhesion to the print bed and before long I had a small army of rather menacing-looking Snowmen on my workbench:
With the addition of their hats these little guys started to look a little friendlier:
Printing the orange carrot noses proved a little problematic as such tiny parts are difficult to get stuck to the print bed. In the end I found printing them in rows with a relatively large brim did the trick:
By comparison the twig arms printed much easier than I had expected:
Each snowman kit was individually bagged and as a finishing touch I added a label giving a clue as to how the completed kit should look:
Apparently the kids in my daughter's class were quite thrilled by these, so Mission Accomplished. The snowman kits would also make a great trinket to put inside some home-made Christmas crackers, something I'll probably do for Christmas 2017.
3D Printing - bringing a little magic to the holiday season!