Feather and Chain Bookmark

Background

My son is rapidly improving in his Blender skills and wanted to enter his first Printables contest.

He also decided to jump in at the deep end thinking that this would also be a good time to experiment with a print-in-place chain effect.

To this end he has produced this bookmark.

Details

It consists of a feather which has a slit which allows it to fit over a page to stop the whole thing falling out of the book by accident. It then has a long chain which separates the pages which makes opening the book to where you left it incredibly easy.

The model was created in Blender as a .STL file and then loaded into Prusa slicer where it has been saved as a .3mf file and included here. 

There is also the gcode file that was used on the Prusa-Mini to produce the model in the photographs. Please note that this uses a brim to ensure the chain link stays in place.

Printing notes

This model was printed in PLA using the default 0.15mm Quality layer-height settings. 

After a number of failed print attempts, experimentation proved that the only way to successfully print the model was using a brim. 

This does mean that once printed, you do need to spend some time carefully trimming away the brim taking care not to damage the links. But as you can see from the photographs it is possible.

If anyone has any ideas on how to improve the model or make it easier to print, please comment below as my son would love to hear your thoughts.