Rotating Skull Gear with snap pins

thingiverse

I've learned that I have a thing for 3D printing geared objects and decided to print CarryTheWhat's Rotating Skull Gears. This is a great mashup between Emmett's gear code and a Skull image by bothacker. This was actually one of my first prints a couple years back, but my machine was not tuned well and it did not turn well. After having great success with Emmett's new parametric snap pins, I thought that this might benefit from a conversion to the new pin type, so I loaded the files into Tinkercad, plugged the holes and created the new ones that work with the parametric snap pins. I made one minor mistake when doing the conversion. I used the standard pin size which was just slightly too long for the center piece. I did some testing and found that all I had to do was to cut off the tip of the pins that go into those holes. Long story short, it goes together well and works great! Just add a little of your favorite lubricant. I recommend either silicone spray or white lithium grease. And again hats off to CarryTheWhat for the great design! Print Settings Rafts: No Resolution: .2mm Infill: 10% Notes: Print one of each gear piece, one center piece and 8 pins. I recommend printing an extra pin or two just in case. The pieces can print with no support, which is what I did. If you do this, you will get some stringing when it prints the jaw bone below the ear, but it should clean up alright. Or you could use support. The rest do not need support. Post-Printing First clean up any stringing and make sure that the gears look clean. I also like to take an exacto knife and clean of the edge of the rotating hole on each gear where the plastick sticks out slightly from squishing the first print layer. On to assembly- First, I put the pins into the skull gears pointed end first. Make sure that the end of the pin that sticks out is the cut off end. lubricated them turning them a few turns to work in the lube. I used white lithium grease spray. Then assemble the skull by connecting the pieces to the center piece. I recommend looking at the original skull model to determine orientation. You can find it here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3400 First I connect all four of the large pieces to the center. They go on the large sides of the center piece taking care to put them on the right sides in relation to each other. They will be able to spin freely so that you can line them up as you add each small gear. I then added the nose bridge and the bottom pieces because they are easy to line up. The other two corners are different sizes, so it is easy to tell which goes where.