When a mere card won’t do: 3D-printing unique gifts for friends

Recently a friend of mine invited me to his doctoral thesis completion party. I wanted to congratulate him, and just bringing a flower or two felt like it would not emphasize the event enough. After giving it a bit of thought, I decided to model and 3D print a small statue for him. In Finland, and possibly some other nordic countries, it is a custom that the individuals who reach the doctorate level in their studies will receive the right to wear a specific type of sword and a top hat. According to the lore, the sword symbolizes the strength of knowledge against ignorance. Never the less, these items were found to be rather pricey. As they are always handmade by request, my friend thought he may not bother. That’s when I saw my chance: he earned that sword and that hat and he should absolutely have those.

I quickly started prototyping a small statue which would feature those items. At first, I really wanted the items to be removable, so they could be taken of the pedestal and put back. Unfortunately, this proved to be highly difficult with such a small scale (12cm), where an error of only 0,5mm would be enough to break the system. I didn’t want the system to dominate too strongly where I could place the items on the pedestal, and with the pedestal being hollow for budget reasons and the pillar rather narrow for aesthetic reasons, it was just impossible to lay the sword on the pedestal in any more relaxed manner. In the end, after multiple complicated tests, I decided to drop the functionality and go with a solid statue.

The statue was printed with a Formlabs 2 at the library of Iso omena, Espoo. The base material was black resin. The print took about 10 hours and the machine was set at the best possible resolution. The figurine was then spray-painted with miniature colors, first grey and then finally warm white. This was to prevent the black base color from having a distorting shade on the white. A final touch of darker color for little bit of ambient effect for the crevices was added. I’m quite happy how this turned out. I am not really a miniature hobbyist, so the painting job is somewhat inaccurate at places, but the Formlabs is an incredible printer when it comes to precision. The result: The fresh doctor was delighted by his newfound office decor and promised to place it so that it would invoke envy among colleagues. 😉

The finished statue

A ruler for scale. The height is about 12cm.

Putting on the first light grey layer of paint