#3d printed legos

[orc3dprint]

look at this TOOL NOT A WEAPON I made

[kodiakcaptures]

Toa Orde, the first toa of Psionics

Inspired by Doni and Silvak's versions.

Mask model designed by Doni and Galva

Edited by Luhan/Overheating Orange

[the-ninjago-historian]

I was hunting down new Ninjago info to post and uh...

Wait, wut?🤨😆😂

[ozziebeans]

Ehli - Toa of Iron

By the by, I've created a short Bionicle animation! This was done in Blender to show off my Ehli project, working to recreate a few less-than traditional building and damage methods. Check it out! ^^

[nonbinary-octopus]

so my current 3D printing project is this: I am making a giant lego man

not super huge, just 5x regular lego size. It'll be about eight inches tall when complete

the reasons for this are, primarily, because it’s cool, and also. I just bought legos with my own adult money for the first time, and it turns out that lego people are for some reason considerably more expensive than lego bricks. I had a whole rant about it earlier that I'm not going to retype here, but the short version is, I did not buy any lego people

but then I went on thingiverse and I found a model for a large-scale lego person! (with this remix for better arms)

and I thought, that is very cool. I am going to make a giant lego person, who can sit on top of the lego box and guard the bricks

and then, because it would take quite a while to print the whole thing, I did a miniature test print at regular lego size, which is 20% of the original file size

it took about an hour

and he is a pretty good little lego man!

His head's a little loose, but not too bad. I had to reprint the hands cause I originally oriented them stupidly and they broke immediately, but once I redid them in a smarter position, they just took a little sanding of support droopies before they fit great.

The shoulders took some effort to pop into place, but I had expected that. On the rare occasion an arm came off of a lego person when I was a kid, I remember it being extremely difficult to put it back on. Once I got the arms in place and wiggled them back and forth a few times, they moved perfectly smoothly

The legs were trickier to attach to the hips, and one of them keeps angling itself oddly, so that he stands a bit pigeon-toed. If you mess with it too much, it will fall off.

Also the hips keep springing back out of the torso, which isn't great.

Based on this, plus a couple comments on thingiverse which said several connections were not working great, I knew I might need to make some adjustments. And to know exactly how it needed to be adjusted, I needed to print it at full scale

but I didn't want to spend several days printing, only to have to make adjustments and potentially have to reprint every file

so, first, I made a connection test file

I cut the individual pieces up into just their connection points: a slice of neck from the torso, and the bottom of the head. the shoulder pin on the arm, and the shoulder hole in the torso. The hip pin and hole. the wrist, and the entire hand because it's the smallest piece and didn't make nearly as much of a difference if I printed the whole thing. Plus, it rests on the hand on the buildplate, and it would be tricky to get just the hand post to print without including the hand

the first printing attempt spaghettified

it slipped horizontally not far in, and I suspect that caused the spaghetti, when it tried to print over somewhere that should have been supported and now wasnt. Can't be sure, because nobody saw it happen. My husband called me down to stop the printer when he noticed.

this is the shoulder hole and neck post

it wasn't a total waste, however. I was able to tell from what little had printed of the neck and head that the neck hole was far too large for the post.

So, I made an adjustment to the torso file, making the neck post larger, and restarted the test print with the new version. Unfortunately, restating meant that it went into the evening rather later than I had initially planned, sparking a conversation about what times of day would be most convenient for me to print things so as to not render the living room unhospitible (no hard feelings in either direction, it's just. a loud machine. and it can get annoying to listen to)

That test print went fine, and I was able to test all the fits

conclusions:

the neck now fits perfectly

the hand post is much too small for the wrist

the hip and shoulder joints are both too snug. I was able to force them together, but they will not rotate (they also now will not separate, and the layers around the shoulder hole split when forcing the shoulder pin inside)

so, back to the modeling program to make more adjustments. The simplest of these was to thicken the arm post

for the shouder, I measured all the bits and discovered that part of the problem is that the wall of the torso around the shoulder hole was thicker than the length of the pin before the flared head

in short, the pin was not long enough to reach all the way through the hole and have the flared head pop out on the other side

so, I lengthened the pin, and also put the slit on the flared head on the top as well as the bottom, for extra squishability

For the hips, they have a different pin shape than the shoulder, so I decided to replace it with the same mushroom-shaped kind of pin the shoulder has. I also widened the hole in the leg piece slightly.

You may notice that I didn't mention testing the hip-to-torso connection, despite noting that there was an issue on my initial miniature print. This is because in order to test it, I'd need to print a large enough portion of both the hip and torso pieces that I might as well print the whole thing, so I figured it would be better to get all the other connections correct first, and then adjust that one as need be.

I did take a look at it in the modeling program, however, and discovered that when assembled, the posts in the hips and the sides of the torso attempt to be in the same location. So I trimmed the hip posts to fit.

Then I printed all the altered files in miniature again, because that's a pretty quick test print

As I had hoped, the legs clicked on much better and more sturdily, and the hips fit into the torso much more securely as well.

The hands and head no longer fit at all, but I'd figured that would be the case as well, considering their fit on my initial test and my subsequent adjustments. I'd printed four hands when reprinting them earlier, testing two slightly different positions (the difference in results was negligible), so I used the extras for the new figure. I sanded down the neck post a bit to get the head to fit, and perhaps I should have sanded a bit more but I didn't feel like it

With that promising test, I prepared a new test print file to test the fit of all the adjusted parts at full scale (save the neck, already tested, and the hip-to-torso connection, will test later as explained earlier - so, just the hip and shoulder joints, and the hand, since I didn't change the wrist and can reuse it to test the new hand)

That's printing currently. Will update when it's done.

[cryoverkiltmilk]

assorted gods bless human ingenuity

Bionicle to Fruit Adapter by Megawillbot

It also works on potatoes.

[notblazedenough]

My current Bionicle book collection!

[gammaliminal]

hey guys i think more of you should see this video of this person making a lego train for their cats

that is all

[mercurialkrimpy]

Saw this at my local Lego store today

It's a collaboration with ESA where they're conducting research on building with space materials for the Artemis program (so like 3D printing on the moon and such).

This brick was printed from a ground up asteroid! So incredibly cool :D

[fredpickle01]

Bionicle masks

I 3d printed a bunch of bionicle masks over the past couple of days. I printed a faxon, arthron, kiril, and nikila’s mask (the actual name of which I don’t remember).

[someblakearts]

Pyramid Head Lego Minifig from Silent Hill 2

I'm a big fan of Silent Hill 2 and wanted to try something a little different this weekend. Here's a model, print of a Silent Hill 2-themed minifig. It's a Pyramid Head, complete with his iconic (O.G.) helmet and long sword.

I'm really happy with how it came out. I think it captures the character of Pyramid head without betraying the simple look of the lego minifigs.

If you want to give it a print yourself you can find it over on my new MyMiniFactory page here or my Cults3D page here. There's lots on there for free, but you can get 50% off any purchase in the store with the code blaketoys50.

[kodiakcaptures]

Chiara, the volatile toa of lightning

Edited by Luhan/Overheating Orange

The volitak variant was 3D modeled and 3D printed by Galva and Doni respectively

[anthyies]

ok everybody wish me luck in packing the day i move. (tomorrow)

[the-64th-gamer]

when I get a 3D printer soon I wanna work on a lego style building system compatible for larger scale stuff. 1x scale lego sucks to print cause the tolerances are wrong, but 2x with some modifications might be great.

Also not a fan at now being an adult and lego being so tiny to work with compared to as a kid, especially with the current trend towards micro details. Having giant ass bricks and figs would be great!!!

[nonbinary-octopus]

the 3D printer is kind of loud, so I try not to do long prints during the times when other people like to use the living room. Mostly this means that the morning and early afternoon are fine, but try not to be printing in the later afternoon or the evening

trouble is, I don't usually get up in time to start a print before work, so if I have a long print, it tends to wait until I happen to wake up early without being tired.

for my current project, I had prepared a print file which would take about five hours. Probably a little more, since Cura's estimates always seem to be on the conservative side.

So I haven't printed it for a few days

then yesterday, I realized: this is five separate objects that I merely grouped together because they are related. I had assumed it would be more convenient to print them together than separately, but that may not be the case.

So I separated them out into three print files. I still grouped two pairs together, so I ended up with two files of about 2 hours each, and one file with 1 hour

much easier to print without being a disturbance

anyway this morning I woke up at 7:30, and at 8:30 decided to get up and print the full 5 hour file

[deepwoundsandfadedscars]

Cameron Monaghan will be at the nearby expo at the end of the month but it's during my upcoming busy season 😭😭