Snake wand

We started to design a snake patterned wand as soon as our printer was able to print. The first version was ready in about a week and we started to print immediately. At first we tried to print it in three pieces as little pillars - and turned out this way as the printer moved upward the pillars moved more and more, so it was nearly not precise enough. Unfortunately at that time we didn't document everything so we don't have pictures about this incident.

After the first failure we cut it in four pieces: cut by half in lengthwise and traverse. It was a big success, the printed result was better than we expected. And it was easy to attach it with super glue, because we had the great idea to one side's part overlapped the other side's cut. This way the contacting interface was much bigger and the glue was much more effective.

Let's emphasise the headpiece of the wand: it's a little skull. It was printed separately and glued to the end of the wand later. It turned out very detailed and fit to the wand perfectly.

The result, however, was not exactly what we had in mind when we started designing: it was shorter and thicker, so we redesigned it and printed yet another one. But even this way we painted the first one too: it was a good experience to see how it turn out with some paint and we plan to sell it sooner or later. The painted version looks much better then the unpainted one - but it is the same with every thing we printed so far: a little paint does miracle.

Fortunately we learnt from our first try and we didn't have any problems printing the second wand - although we had to split it into six pieces because it is a little bit longer then the first one. It turned out as we expected - glued together with the same technique used for the first wand and painted the same brown-gold color scheme too. The thinner and longer design looks much better.

After some consideration we have decided we will sell kits: the exact same result comes out of the printer we are using to build the things we have. This way we can sell it much cheaper (the hand painting is time consuming, thus expensive) and we are sure there are more people out there who are having fun gluing and painting it.