Last year I designed and built a wooden table for our entryway. I modeled the design using Sketchup in order to visualize the design prior to cutting any wood. Now that I have my Snapmaker 2 I thought I’d try 3D printing the model to test how well it reproduced the mortise and tenon joinery.
All of the mortise and tenon and dovetail joinery is accurate with the full size table. And it worked pretty well, although I should have put a bit more effort into providing supporting structures for the overhanging bits - some sanding and filing was required in order to make the parts fit.
I initially tried laser engraving a photo of the real table top onto the 3D printed 1/4 scale table top, but I couldn’t get a dark enough finish without melting the PLA. So for my second take I laser engrave a piece of cherry veneer and inlayed that into the 3D printed table top.
Very cool-did you need to raft anything to get the joints to match up correctly? I noticed that the “elephant foot” was a real problem making anything that needed to match up exactly.
I didn’t raft anything, but the legs were a bit of a problem because of the skinny footprint and compound curves. I ended up laying them on their sided and using support structures.
Thanks for the link! I did experiment with support structures but didn’t have much success. Luban’s documentation isn’t clear on implementing supports so I was using trial and error to guess which types of supports to use where and what settings to use. This guide should help me!
I’ll bet. I’m currently in the middle of a project with a bunch of complex curves, and they’re definitely a challenge to support (and then post-process after removing said supports). I’ve read about using a dual extruder with water soluble supports, and it sounds like a great idea for stuff like this. I see it’s on the roadmap, so at this point I’d definitely buy a new head for that feature.
Note that the table top pictured above was printed as a simple slab and was later replaced with the one pictured below, using construction more accurate to the full size table:
