Spring-o-sphere

 

Schorhr's Spring-o-sphere model on Thingiverse looked like a perfect example of a model that's unsuitable for building on the SD300: very thin walls surrounding a large trapped volume.  But that made me curious, so I included the Spring-o-sphere in a batch of models back in June.

I anticipated there might be trouble peeling the support material away, so I put a box of peeling cuts around the Spring-o-sphere so it would be isolated in its own little 'brick.'

As expected, it was tedious peeling away all the enclosed material a tiny bit at a time.  Right at the start the little hook broke off the top, so I expected more breakage.

But the rest of the material peeled away without any further breakage.

The body of the spring proved to be surprisingly resilient.  On close examination I could see lots of little loose ends.  These are unsightly but they don't seem to weaken the spring.

Evidently this unexpected resiliency was imparted by the long overlap between layers.  There's exactly 1 layer of red material in the model, but red band shows how that layer extends a long distance around the spring, thereby giving it ample distance to be bonded with the layers above and below.

It's a nice container for holding shiny objects.

Despite my relative success building this Spring-o-sphere, I still regard it as a model that's basically unsuited to the SD300 build process.  But the experiment suggests I could choose to build such a model in a pinch, provided I'm willing to sacrifice the model's visual appearance (eg: broken hook, loose ends) and invest extra effort (eg: repair hook, tedious peeling).  I certainly wouldn't recommend doing this sort of model routinely, but it's nice to know I could.