Summary and Licensing

I made this trophy by adding text to an excellent 3D scan of a North American Football I found on Sketchfab: https://sketchfab.com/models/47d1da77937a464a99c2b53c3b24b70e

That model was licenced with Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

I also am licensing the files I've created in the same manner.

I've included the STL I printed and the blender file. Be warned, this was my first real bout with blender so there are a lot of mistakes. Hopefully you can make sense of my mess if you take a gander to modify the file yourself.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Notes on Printing

You will likely need to scale the stl to fit your z-axis.

As awesome_beu noted in his make of this object, you will need to check your slicer's output to ensure the letters are not printing within the ball. I did not make the STL a solid as I should have and so the geometry is still present within the ball. See: https://www.thingiverse.com/make:701792/

For easier mounting and printing, I lowered the object on the z-axis so it would have the bottom cut off. This gave a nice flat surface that made it easier to mount and there was much less overhang.

Make sure your z-axis end-stops are not flipped upside-down. My first print was at 0.05mm (egregious overkill) and took 7 days. It failed at 98% because my z-axis end-stops were upside-down and the print was supposed to max out the height.

The second attempt at printing the file was done at 0.10 mm and 10% infill. It took about 4 days to print.

Side Notes

This makes an excellent trophy topper. The gentleman at the local trophy shop said that this was one of his favorites he's ever mounted in the 30 years he's been doing it.

There's a printable base you can get from awesome_beau's thing here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3857323