Truncated Icosahedron - Buckyball (Buckminsterfullerene)

thingiverse

I helped build a couple of soccer robot kits this week and liked the shape of the 40mm soccer ball included with the kits. Its surface is made up of both hexagons and pentagons - a soccer ball with flat sides. After a quick google search, I found a tutorial to build up a Buckyball or more formally, a Buckminsterfullerene in honor of the architect Richard Buckminster Fuller (inventor of the Geodesic Dome). At the heart of the object is a Truncated-Icosahedron with a carbon atom attached at each of the 60 vertices (edge intersetions). The description says this is the most symmetrical molecule possible made up of 60 Carbon atoms. Who could argue with that? The Buckyball here (less Carbon atoms) has a 40mm DIA to match the one that comes with the soccer robot as shown in the photo of the bot, the included ball and the MakerBot printed one. Here is the tutorial URL (no affiliation):http://www.webdesign.org/3d-graphics/tutorials/how-to-make-a-buckyball.597.html Instructions In SkeinForge: Enable 'Support Material on Exterior Only' in RAFT to deal with the angle overhang of the 2 base pentagons of this object. The additional support material does a decent job in getting the object base generated and holding it in place. After the object is generated, I carefully separated the support material by crushing it away from the Buckyball with pliers instead of pulling it from the object and (maybe) breaking the bottom pentagons. Next, I sanded down the remaining support material with some 220 grit sandpaper and then a final short sanding session with some 400 grit to really smooth the surface. To a smaller extent, you may want to repeat the same sanding process on the top of the object to get those 4 top surfaces looking good. In FILL, I set the 'Infill Solidity (ratio)' to 0.05 . That 0.05 value still produced a very strong object, but I am a beginner with SkeinForge and, in full disclosure, the settings of the 'Extra Shells on xxx' (in FILL also) may be making all the difference. One additional note - SkeinForge reported pages of 'there are 2 edges on a triangle' or somesuch non-fatal error, but the GCODE output works fine.