Shrunken head

Yet another Harry Potter related item. This time, it is the shrunken head from the Knight bus. As you can see we printed it in three pieces, but we made a mistake this time. Actually the two back piece was printed for six hours apiece, while the front piece was printed for seven hours. So we lost several hours just because we forgot to check if printing in smaller pieces shorten the time or not.

You may wonder why is it possible that if an object is half the size the printing time is not halved. The answer is the way we print. To increase the quality of the result we set up the slicer application in a way that makes sure one layer is at least two minutes. This means the printing slows down if the layer would be printed for less than two minutes. That means it could happen - and happens often - that printing two pieces of an object doesn't increase the printing time significantly.

As you can see we painted only the front of the face, because the back would be covered by hair anyway.

The painting process was the usual: several layers of base coat, even more layers of acrylic paint, finishing layer. But this time the painting was not the end of the making.

The hair is simply black thread cut to the right length and then folded by two. We glued the threads to the head using a glue gun. The process took hours.

This is the result - now this guards our entrance door.