Pole Dancer Sculpture Headphone Stand

This is a simple but elegant headphone stand idea I came up with after stumbling across a variation of this “Titanic” pole dancing pose while browsing Pinterest and being fascinated by the anti-gravity look. I wanted a stand design that would be able to accommodate almost any headphone design/dimensions without putting unnecessary pressure or wear on the pads or headband unlike my last headphone stand design. The only piece that isn't 3D printed is a 3/8 inch (9.4mm) x 12 inch (305mm) aluminum rod. I bought mine from Amazon for a few dollars.

The stand has 4 main parts: the headphone rest (bow), base plate, top half, and bottom half of the dancer. There is also a square pin used for connecting and aligning the top and bottom halves of the body together. Even though I modeled the pin to be a perfect fit in the geometry cutouts in the halves I had to scale mine down by ~10% in the Cura to fit due to my printer's tolerances (Ender 3 V2). Because of this, I recommend this pin should be printed after the body parts and scaled in the slicer to fit snugly within the holes of the body on your given printer.

Even with a snug pin fit you will probably want to glue the top and bottom together to help make the seam less noticeable. I used a little gel super glue. Before the glue sets it's probably a good idea to fit it onto pole, aligning the cutouts. I failed to do this and so my top half pole cutouts are slightly misaligned, but not enough to make it usable so I didn't reprint.

Since the tolerances on the holes in all parts were tuned to my printer and my specific rod dimensions (after it was sanded and polished) they might need to be adjusted for your printer's tolerances either before printing (scaling a part up or down slightly in the slicer) or with post processing (sanding/glue).

All pieces were designed to be printed as they are aligned in the STLs. The only piece that will require supports is the bottom half of the dancer to support the lower back/bottom. The feet were able to print just fine without supports with only a tiny bit of roughness on the one foot that was easily cleaned up so I advise against supports on the feet to save plastic and time.

I used a brim on the top and bottom half of the dancer, but I regret it hindsight since it made cleanup much more time consuming and harder make the transition seamless due to the elephant foot first layer. If you are at all confident in your print bed adhesion I would advise against doing brims.

I printed all pieces at 0.12mm layer heights for a smooth finish and tight tolerances but did adaptive layers in Cura from 0.12mm to 0.28mm (0.2 +/- 0.08mm in 0.04mm steps) on the base part to speed the printing process since it has such a large surface area. Additionally, I had to adjust Cura's “Minimum Wall Line Width” to 0.28mm to get it to fully print the fine details on the dancer.

I also used about 8%-15% line style infill on all parts. I suggest not skimping too much on the infill on the base piece or the headphone rest since they are designed to be pressure fit onto the rod and will take a lot of torque from headphone weight. The dancer infill is much less critical being a non-weight bearing part.

I printed all parts in white Jayo brand PLA. I can't speculate on what tweaks would need to be necessary for other materials since I only have experience with PLA but materials more prone to warping would be very problematic for this design, especially the dancer since the top and bottom halves need to be gapless to not be noticeable.

2023/06/04 Update: I have added a version of the stand that uses a 6mm rod instead of the 9.5mm version due to a request by @scmanjarrez. I uploaded the STLs as a Zip in the “Other Files” category so the different size files aren't mixed and the wrong versions downloaded accidentally. I have not printed this version myself so, YMMV. The photos on this listing also still only reflect the original 9.4mm version.