3D-Printed Droid Bobbleheads

The neat think about Thingiverse is the sharing and remixing culture. All of the files are downloadable, and they’ve made it easy to attach various licenses to them. Someone over there by the name of 3d-printy has created a line of bobbleheads. They’re designed to attach to the print-head of certain kinds of 3D printers and wobble around during printing. I don’t have that kind of printer, but I liked a couple of the Star Wars variations and ended up printing a Gonk droid to put on the dashboard of our car. The problem? The spring is also 3D printed and the car gets hot…

My little dashboard buddy got a little too melty as the 3D-printed spring warped in the heat of the parked car during the second-annual unprecedented Portland heat.

Random fact: years ago, I helped run a Rube Goldberg competition where we supplied parts to the teams. I have a few things left over from that event, including a box of compression and extension springs I’ve never found a use for. Until now!

Given Thingiverse’s permissive remix policy, I decided to measure a couple of matching springs and rework the 3D models to replace the springs. My variants of R2D2 and Gonk take a spring that’s 10mm in diameter with wire that’s about 1.5mm in diameter, since that was a common size in the box and would make for a good bobble. I made some remixes in Blender and am quite happy with the results!

These little dudes now ride with me in the car, nodding in agreement to every speedbump.

Posted in: MakerBot Projects

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Brian Enigma

Brian Enigma is a Portlander, manipulator of atoms & bits, minor-league blogger, and all-around great guy. He typically writes about the interesting “maker” projects he's working on, but sometimes veers off into puzzles, software, games, local news, and current events.

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