Saddlebill Stork in Flight - Advanced Print

This Saddlebill Stork is my most challenging project yet: the most complex design, the most challenging print with several new design decisions, making it different from any of my previous designs.

When I began this project, I had a picture in my mind: the beautiful sweep and span of the wings as a bird took flight. In doing my research, I decided that the saddlebill stork, native to Africa, most fit my vision. I wanted individual feathers, completely modeled to better capture the flight. I know that in real life there are multiple layers of feathers in the wing, but I felt that would add complexity without necessarily enhancing the look significantly. My other goal was to make it look like the bird was actually in flight. My stand was designed to make it look like he was taking off from a marshy area. While the grass blades are supporting him, I didn't want it to be incredibly obvious. I think I reached that goal.

This may sound a little off-putting, but this print isn't for the beginner or the faint of heart. It took me weeks and repeated attempts of printing, along with many arduous hours removing the supports and repairing feather damage, to get this print complete. I have some ideas below on how to make it easier (hopefully dramatically), but the project was simply too large for me to try multiple approaches. 

This design will require a multi-color printer or painting after the fact. The print setting file is multi-color, while I also included STL's if anyone wants to use those instead. The bulk of my previous designs used color-separate parts, but doing so here would create seams where they really shouldn't be. I went multicolor to minimize this. Also, if printed to scale, the print will need a K2 Plus (350 mm cubed volume) or similar-sized printer. 

The wingspan of the bird is about 30 inches. Each wing is printed as a single piece and on my K2, each wing had to go on the bed diagonally to fit. When I've posted content during the development of this guy, some have asked about orienting the wings vertically. I didn't do so because I was afraid it the feathers would simply be too fragile. Many know that the weakest part of any model is the inter-layer adhesion. While printing vertically would dramatically reduce supports, I'm afraid that as fine as the feathers are, even a light bump could damage them if printed vertically. 

I haven't tried smaller printers, but if your printer IS smaller, then scaling may be necessary. If you do try a scaled print, please let me know how it goes, and let me know what was your scaling factor to make it fit your printer.

Print Recommendations

Use high-quality PLA with a layer height of 0.1 mm to capture the small features of the bird. Supports are absolutely critical here and are not easy regardless of settings. Underneath the more solid parts of the bird (the body, legs, head and tail), the supports I used worked really, really well.  I used organic supports (tree) with the slim option. I used a 0.3 top gap and a 0.2 bottom gap. For the stand, I increased the support angle to add supports. You may want to increase the walls on the trees. While the supports on the build plate were fine, I had problems with the supports that were based on the stand coming off. There's no provision in the newest Creality print for brims on the base of trees that I could find.

The wings, however, were another story. It took me over six hours on each wing to remove all the supports. Even then I damaged the feathers, although I was able to repair most of the damage. I did get some PVA to try as a water-soluble interface, but it was too soft to run through my CFS without jamming. That said, I found that if it was not bone-dry, it became softer. I did dry the PVA which did make it more stiff, but by that time I was past trying it on the wings. Since each wing took about 36 hours to print, I didn't want to repeat that unnecessarily. I didn't try it, but if it were printed in a single color, I also tried using PETG as an interface filament since it doesn't adhere well to PLA (a good thing for this purpose). I was testing it as I did the stand, and it seemed to work well, but I had other support issues and didn't finish up my testing there. I think it could be a good viable option, although it would really slow down the print due to the printer having to change temperature whenever it went over to the PETG. 

I suspect if the wings were printed single-color they would print dramatically faster, though that would depend on the approach taken for the supports.
PVA prints at a similar temperature as PLA, and I'll try it again on another model. When I do I'll post content here to let folks know how it went, regardless of outcome.

If you try one of the alternate methods I just described, please let me know what you find. 

Assembly Instructions

Assembly is pretty straightforward.  The stork is supported on the breastbone and tail, with the legs slipping under the tail support. Balance can be a little finicky so depending on your needs, you may want to use a drop of glue to stabilize him. Right now mine is simply resting on the stand, but if it becomes an issue, I'll go ahead and glue it.

That's about it. I love the look of the model, but it's a challenge to get right due to the delicacy of the feathers.  I've had a lot of support on my other models, which I appreciate! This is a real creative outlet for me, and the launch of a new model is always an exciting time!

Please enjoy!