Dragon Keycaps for Spacebar and ESC-Key

Start into the Year of the Dragon by decoration your mechanical keyboard with these Dragon Keycaps.

The keycaps are a replacement for the ESC-key and the spacebar. They fit on Cherry switches and have an OEM profile. I have tested the keycaps on different Ducky, Keychron and Epomaker keyboards without any issue.

The keycaps can only be printed with a multimaterial-system (like IDEX, MMU, AMS, etc)  and it will take a long time. The print itself is quite difficult because of the detailed dragon motifs. I recommend to position the parts vertically and to use a very low layer height of 0.08mm. Then you get the best resolution and do not need supports.

Set the speed to slow (~100 mm/s on outer walls / 150 for all other), use three walls, eight tops, five bottoms and 10% gyroid infill. The line width for the first layer must be 0.3 mm to optimize the resolution on the bottom. Using only one wall on the first layer is recommended and Arachne as wall generator is best for quality. Depending on your colours a high flushing volume and a print tower is necessary.
See my 3mf file for further details. The 3mf file has been tested with OrcaSlicer and Bambu Studio.

Make sure that the printbed is clean and grease-free. Use high quality PLA (e.g. Prusament / Sunlu / eSun / Elegoo / Bambu / etc) and calibrate it (flow and k-factor).

I worked on my print profile for many hours and optimzed it for best print quality with a 0.4mm nozzle. This results in a long printing time and a lot of waste. You can try to tweak my settings to squeeze out an even better quality but I guess you will need a 0.2mm nozzle then.

After the print you will notice a lot of blobs due to the frequent color changes. I recommend to wet sand the keycaps. This will only take 10 minutes and can easily be done with 100/180 nails files. Start with a low grid (100), wet sand the keycaps, then move to 180 grid. You can of course continue wet sanding with higher grids for a glossier result.

Dry the keycaps and slap them on your keyboard!

Disclaimer:
This work by blecheimer is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
The dragon motifs are licensed under CC0 1.0 Deed and can be found on https://freesvg.org.
You are not allowed to copy this model to other 3D printing websites without my permission.