Amherst College Mascot

prusaprinters

SummaryTo celebrate going to Amherst College next year, I designed a 3D-printed model of their mascot, a mammoth! This mammoth print acts as a desk plaque and stands on its own. The print is in two different pieces: an outline and an insert. I designed this in their manner so that I could print in two different colors. The print fits into a 5 cm by 7 cm constraint box and is 1 cm thick.  How I Designed ThisWhen I first began this project, I intended to make both the Amherst College mascot and its name in the name print. Soon after beginning the design process, I decided not to print the mammoth with the college name, as the college name caused many thickness issues. I also liked the design better as a single piece without words, which I discovered after making one or two prototypes. To create the mammoth itself, I used a reference picture (picture below) and traced a sketch over it before extruding it.The first sketch of the mammoth outline that I created, I made using only lines. I traced the boxed pixels of the image and then added diagonal lines between each to best follow the contour of the shape making the sketch too complex. This ended up backfiring, as Solidworks had difficulty extruding some of the lines, creating invalid geometry. To remedy this, I instead traced the design with tangent arches and lines. This allowed Solidworks to easily create a solid feature with the outline sketch. After creating the basic outline sketch of the mascot, I made a copy of the Solidworks file so that each part could have the same original mammoth sketch. First, To create the purple mammoth insert using the original reference sketch, I extruded the sketch up 0.7 cm. Then, to create the white, outline piece, I first offset the original reference sketch by 0.04 cm, the offset distance for a tight-fit gap. I then offset this new sketch by 0.4 cm before extruding the outline shape up to 0.7 cm. To create a backing for the piece, I extruded the reference sketch down 0.3, to create an overall thickness of 1 cm. After observing the very sharp corner this design created on some of the outlines near the leg and the tusk, I smoothed out the edges, using the cut-extrude feature to cut out the sharp section. AssemblyTo put together this print, I pushed the “insert” purple mammoth into the “outline” purple mammoth.