April 28, 2020
Description
This little Christmas tree is an advent calendar that I designed for my beloved girlfriend. She had asked for something fun to collect during early Christmas time, rather than simple sweets. After quite some thinking, I decided to order a 24 piece puzzle (32x25cm) for her, so she can collect one piece a day now, and even try to make sense of the picture that is unfolding until Christmas eve.
In the miniature Christmas tree there are 24 slots, one for each day, respectively one for each piece of the puzzle. The cute little snowman is not just decoration, he also serves to push the puzzle pieces into the tree. Since the slots are only 20mm deep, the puzzle pieces will become free when they are pushed in, so they fall out of the open bottom of the tree.
The major challenge with this design was to get the Christmas tree stable, but yet big enough to fit in all the puzzle pieces, while at the same time don't consume a fortune worth of filament. I believe in the end I managed quite well. Most importantly, my girlfriend likes it a lot ;-)
The front is made out of three pieces that need to be glued together (hot melt glue works great for me on PETG, super glue is a good choice for PLA). If your printer can handle the complete front, feel free to print it in one piece. Faster experimenting with the puzzle piece holder was also a reason for me use separate pieces.
The snowman is a generic design, it needs to be scaled to your preference. I chose to have it about 8cm tall. That will get it to 2mm thickness, which give a perfect snap into the base plate, no glue is needed for the snowman in that case.
One word on the screw wholes: I am not perfectly happy with the diameters that I have chosen for the M3 screw holes. For the free holes (where the screw shall not have grip) I have chosen to go for 3.2mm of diameter. It turned out 3.5 would have been better, the screws don't really fall in easily, but it's not a real problem either. The holes that shall have grip, have an inner diameter of 2.6mm, which has always worked for me. Simply forcing a screw in works, because is heats up from the friction so it kind of melts into the plastic and creates a nice thread. In this design the wall thickness of the little blocks for the screws is a bit low, so I recommend to squeeze the block into a vise while you force in the screw for the first time, otherwise they might break. Or simply use a M3 thread cutter, that worked perfectly well for me. All screws needed are M3x6.
Happy Christmas and happy making!
Printer Brand: Prusa
Printer: I3 MK3S
Resolution: 0,15mm
Infill: 100%
Filament: DasFilament.de PETG dark green and black
License:
Creative Commons — Attribution
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HD_Creator
