Full-Color Looks Great On 3D Printed Sliding Puzzles

[Angus] of [Maker’s Muse] displays both a parametric, print-in-place moving puzzle style he developed, and the outcomes of UV printing full-color styles on the exact same. The results look beautiful, and there was a lot of experimentation associated with the procedure.

Creating a great print-in-place moving puzzle depends a lot on tolerances. Today’s 3D printers are a lot more capable in this regard than they were 10 or two years back, however getting the right feel to the pieces was still a long knowing procedure. It’s not simple to get all the various attributes in the best balance. On one hand, if the pieces are too tight they will not move quickly. But if they are too loose, the puzzle can bind due to the fact that the pieces have excessive play. It might likewise bend enough to pop apart. And obviously, the shape of the pieces and their breeding surface areas are constrained to angles and shapes that 3D print dependably. [Angus] stood firm and was successful, and displays whatever from adorable 3 x 3 systems to a huge scaled-up 11 x 11 puzzle, printed on his Prusa XL.

Getting the color onto the print is the work of a desktop UV ink printer, the same model our own Tom Nardi had a hands-on look at in 2015. [Angus] demonstrates how printing a single color image onto the puzzle is quite simple and looks terrific, however what’s even much better is a textured relief image with some genuine tactile depth to it. Expect a lot more work to do for that, due to the fact that thick layers of ink gum the puzzle up with overspray unless one prevents printing over the spaces in the tiles.

Watch both the puzzles and the color printing in action in his video, ingrained simply listed below.