Lucy Long-Legs The Symmetrical Flex Starfish

This is Lucy the long legged symmetrical flexi starfish!  She's a new member of Sally and Susie's family.  She's a whole lot bigger that Susie, as you can see in the attached photos where she's shown alongside Susie.  She uses the same cell size as Susie, but has many more moving parts, so maintains the same level of flexibility and is even more fun to play with!

 

Given the size of this model, it's not going to be available for the A1 Mini, sorry, but Susie is still loads of fun to play with.

 

An AMS is not needed to get this fantastic circle and spots effect, you just need to pause at the appropriate layers and change filament colour.

 

I started my journey designing flexi starfish after trying a couple of others and being dissatisfied with the way they flexed; a starfish has five legs and trying to make one flex by cutting it in to right-angled cubes just does not work.  Hence this diamond shaped cut, which works great!

 

Please clean your build plate thoroughly, as there are many small parts on the first layer.

 

If you've not printed one of my starfish before, you might want to start with Susie which takes half the time, or at least the small test print that come with Susie, to check it prints ok for you.

 

Filament

 

I've used both BambuLabs Basic and Matte PLA successfully.

 

Colouring the model

 

For my prints I change colour at the following heights: 4.6mm, 5.6mm, 6.6mm, 7.6mm, 8.6mm, 9.6mm, 10.6mm, and 11.6mm.

 

Print settings:

 

I use a 0.2 layer height and 0.4 nozzle, I reduce the print speed on the first layer to 30mm/s, I set the z-seam to “back”, and orientate the model as shown in the photos.  Z seam to “back” and the given orientation avoids small strings that otherwise can connect adjacent cells.

 

I hope you enjoy Lucy as much as you enjoyed Susie and Sally, and feel free to come back and share your colour schemes in the comments!

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