Hey gang, Tim here at Core Electronics and today I'll show you a curate trick I use to print scale models without losing detail.

So let me outline the situation. Sometimes you come across an impressively detailed computer model scaled to the correct size and you go to yourself, I want to 3D print that. So you throw it into your favourite CAD and you export it out as an STL, throw it into your favourite slicer and as you can see it's way too large already. So you bring it down to size so that way it fits in your bed. In this case we're going to go all the way down to 14.

And you can see all the little detail is still there and you keep scaling and scaling it until some of the walls end up very thin, too thin for even an extruder to actually represent the model as the walls of the model are too thin for the diameter hole of the extruder nozzle. The nozzle is the limiting factor in regards to the thinness of an extruded material when 3D printing. Thus when you slice highly detailed models scaled down large portions of the subject are neglected as the slicer deems it impossible to replicate that section.

Exactly this problem can be seen over here. Let's start spinning around the model. You can see the whole exhaust system has been neglected along with a whole bunch of other sections. So what is the solution to this? A hardware side of it can be altered, running a smaller nozzle diameter to create thinner lengths of material that can fix this issue. Then you could tell the slicer all about the new hardware and then it will adjust accordingly.

Or if you're interested mainly in the surface of the object being correct and the internals of the subject not necessarily requiring perfect dimensionality, then the trick is to use the surface mode option allows you to overlay two versions of your subject and adjust the settings between them. This setting can be found in Cura under special modes. It allows the model to be printed as a surface only, a volume with loose surfaces, or both. There are three available settings: normal, surface, and both.

If you choose to create a model with the normal setting, you will lose finer details. However, if you use the surface setting and re-slice the model, it will be completely hollow inside while still capturing all the outside details. This means that the outside surface is accurately represented, including details like spokes, exhaust systems, and piping.

From personal experience, the "both" setting does not seem to actually do both. Let me demonstrate this workflow process in Cura. Here is a motorcycle model with the special mode setting currently set to normal. To create a duplicate, I will right-click on the model and select "multiply selected model." I will choose to multiply it by one.

Now you can see another exact replica of the model. To overlay the two models, I can drag one over the other, but it would need to be done accurately. A better way is to adjust the numbers in the settings. By doing this, I now have two models perfectly overlaid on top of each other.And when you do this, you kind of get these blue shiny shimmery things.

So what we're going to do now is we're going to go over here and click this button.

Now, this button lets you decide options for one particular model on your setting, which can be different than all the other options.

So we're going to select the setting that we want to see over here, which in this case is surface mode.

By clicking here, pressing close, you can now see surface mode is available for us here.

So normal and normal, but that's what it is currently, but I want this one to be surface.

So now I've done all the setting up, we're going to press slice and then by clicking this button we can select the model that we want to see over here.

We can see that we have now a slicer CAD file which has made one of the models be surface only and the other model be normal.

This results in a print which is both externally dimensionally correct and also has enough strength for the real world.

When it comes to actually printing this motorcycle, it was laid down on its side and a large amount of support material was used as you can see in the actual Cura file I used to print this motorcycle.

I used CPE transparent as the material for strength properties, but it is also a material prone to stringing.

There is always finesse in refining a 3D printer, particularly for when using a new material, and I have a ways to go with CPE transparent.

Dissolving the PVA was a particularly magical moment.

Also, I experimented with not using an ooze shield as I considered the amount of PVA support would take over the role of that job.

However, the lack of protection affected the results of the handlebars and the footrests, both required post-processing to repair, but hopefully thisDemonstrates to you how close we are to FDM printing large-scale models. The press play wait and there it is it's just so close.

All this print requires was a little bit of tuning and then it would be ripe and ready for some proper painting. In fact, the limiting factor currently is me. Oh great 3D printing gods please let me 3D print just a little bit better. Please.

Anyhow, big thanks goes to Kamil Azikulov and the GrabCAD community. He is truly a prodigy of a 3D modeler which truly he's created the greatest CAD model of the Brose superior available online.

These models coming out of Uzbekistan in Ukraine are truly extraordinary. The CAD designers over there are beyond impressive and the fact that they provide heaps and heaps of models for free it's a true true true form of perfection. Cheers mate.

Anyhow, I hope this has inspired you to get out there and search for some amazing CAD files and just give it a go trying to 3D print it. I know I will be refining my techniques over here.

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