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Monday, March 30, 2015

Adventures with 3D printing - chocolate bunny strikes back

Welcome to another episode of adventures with 3D printing. Previously, I tried to make a chocolate bunny using small 3D printed mold, but I was too impatient to let chocolate set properly.

Well, first I printed larger bunny. Previous one was a 50% scale model.

You can see two problems here:

  • There's some leftover chocolate stains from previous time - these are generally in gaps between printed layers (0.3mm/layer or whatever they are). Making layers smaller is possible, but I don't think it would help. I think maybe sandpaper to smooth it would be useful? Staining is more an eyesore than a serious issue. I'll think about it the next time.
  • There are supporting rafts on bottom of each mold - they are not absolutely necessary, but they help 3D printed model stick during printing and then be removed from platform without damaging it. I'm sure I had precision knife somewhere, but I couldn't be bothered to look in my stacks of stuff, so I ordered first hit for "precision knife" on Amazon instead, and it just came, so let's go!


This is much more tedious than I expected. The blade is just way too small, and the whole thing is generally miserable. At least I remembered to do it safely. Here it is 2/3 done.


Fuck! Monty Python was right, bunnies are bloodthirsty bastards. I got distracted by making pictures, and when I got back to it, I had a brief safety lapse, resulting in extremely bloody cut on tip of my left index finger.

This wasn't particularly painful, but it's ridiculously difficult spot to bandage properly (especially doing it with just one hand), I went through 10 bandages before I got it right. That reminds me, TODO list: "buy more bandages".


Of course that did not stop me for more than a few minutes. Rafts got all removed by result is still ugly and uneven. I'll need to research better techniques for the future.


Chocolate filling both. The model has small studs and holes so both sides fit - for smaller scale version they're not really good enough so I used some rubber band too (as before). Another problem was that small one wouldn't stand on its own now (it was using raft for support previous time), so it leans against big one.


And it's now in the fridge. Just in case anybody wonders what kind of stuff I tend to keep there - it's all totally reasonable - cheese, fruit, tea, yoghurt, 3D printed chocolate bunnies, just the usual. By the way, I so wish I had American style double door fridge, it's all so small.


This time I just left it there for half a day. OK, it's definitely not molten. There's some overflow on the top because chocolate is hard to pour exactly, and some more on the bottom - I guess something to press two parts of the mold together more strongly wouldn't be a bad idea.


Using kitchen knife as level between two parts of the mold worked wonders to get one of them off cleanly. Also removing some overflow bits.


And I have no idea how to get it out of the mold without breaking it. Well, other than remelting the chocolate, that would kinda work.

Should I have greased the mold before doing anything?

I'll probably just break it out the messy way and devour the bunny.

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