3d printed acorn

I live in the middle of the new english national forest. This year's been a very good year for acorns on a lot of the small young oak trees.
After a single success and many failures in electroplating acorns.
I decided it would be easier to simply design and print a plastic acorn instead.

Crashed openscad a few times in the process. It really doesn't like more than 2000 objects.
But in the end I came up with a pretty good fake acorn.
Sliced it with flashprint (cutting it in half also crashed openscad) to make a brooch, printed in reprapper tech wood coloured pla and hand coloured the cup.

Attachment 9779



Attachment 9780

Attachment 9781

Just printed one with an added twig on the base, waiting for printbite to cool, not sure if the twig is tough enough to take a hit with my hammer :-)

On the whole I'm pretty pleased with the result - and this will be much easier to electroplate than a real acorn.

Got impatient - twig survived the hammer :-)
Attachment 9782

Used a darker green for the cup, looks much better in the flesh - so to speak.

Using decent safety clasp brooch backs - should be able to sell these.
So, no - the .scad an .stl files are not going to be made available :-)

And for the chap who said 0.1 and 0.2 layer height was rough. these were printed at 0.2mm on a replicator dual clone at 60mm/s printspeed.
I would gain nothing at all using a smaller layer height.

That is very very cool. And goes to show what a finely printer is capable of. Well done!

Alchemist :rolleyes:

Did you try using a sealer on the real acorn before applying the conductive paint?

no - but that's a very good idea :-)
But the problem with real acorns is they dry out and shrink.
Once you cut them in half, you have to glue them back together and they shrink a lot faster. The sealer would help with that.

Plus most trees have dropped them now, it's a fairly short harvest window.
Might try the sealer next year :-)

So the artificial ones are better as i can make them all year round :-)

This is really cool. I wonder if it will crack and shrink later on.
They always seem to pop in the winter as the moisture gets sucked out .

It's plastic - why would it shrink :-)

Very resembling:)

It's awesome :D