3D Printing Museum Artifacts

While preparing for Hello, Vancouver from The Forum at the Library, I wanted to print something new that helps illustrate the practicality of 3D printers. I decided it was time to dig into museum prints.

I heard about museum scans two or three years ago, but hadn't really spent the time to see how they came off the printer. 

While searching online, I found 3D Printing resources for the British Museum, Met Museum of Art, as well as educational resources.  I don't think I'll have any shortage of useful objects to print.

For this week's presentation, I started work on the British Museum's Lewis Chessmen. The original file was a complete set of chessmen. It was also tiny, so I scaled it up. It failed once, so I printed again with a raft, but it failed again.

After poking around, I did find the individual models. I started with the queen. When I loaded the model into Cura, she was tiny, so I scaled her up 30%.  Then I noticed she was at a bit of an angle, so I rotated her around so she was standing up with a raft, and she did alright.

I printed her bro (the King) next.  He was also tiny and at a funny angle. I got him oriented to print standing up...

Little bit of a gap...

Still doing okay...

He failed.

So I rotated him onto his back and the print went a little faster. They still took ~2.5 hours a piece.

I made sure to print this information from the British Museum. I enjoy having them as a talking piece to help people realize that students may never have the opportunity to visit these items in their museum, but we can bring a little bit of the museum experience into our classrooms (and libraries)!