Eagle 1 (Fixed!) Easy-Print -- Space 1999 by PrintMaker28

Last crawled date: 2 years, 10 months ago

This is a massive re-work of the 12" (31cm) long "easy-print/build" Eagle 1 by korb3n and later, alpokemon. The original model had huge issues with the proportions of the center body/pod section, engines and cockpit, when compared with the on-screen studio model.
It's now about as screen-accurate as practical, but a significant amount more work could be done on fine-tuning surface details (greebles) and still-outstanding corrections.
For those that are curious, I've added a proportional comparison of this model and David Sisson's original 44" studio model (red bars are the same width). The lens and distance used to shoot the photos will distort some aspects, but a few things are now obvious! The engine bells are too large in diameter (now fixed!) and the front/rear body blocks areas might not be quite the right length (hard to tell, the model does match the reference drawing pretty closely...).
I tried to improve upon alpokemon's efforts at making it simple to print/build. I did away with the "alignment cubes" and simply made it that the core of the model can be assembled on a flat surface, using superglue (cyanoacrylate).
The included "exploded-view" of the model is NOT all the parts, it's just showing the positional relationship of the major components.

Major corrections/modifications:

The center "pod" was significantly narrowed, the windows were moved to the correct position, the cutout above the door was repaired, surface greebles were fixed/added and the underside VTOL engine and the pod landing gear points were correctly positioned. The lowest part of the outer pod detail is still incorrect, but that's on the to-do list!


The front/rear halved body sections were narrowed and had small underside tabs added to make building on a flat surface possible (just line-up the marks and follow the text!) All the existing "tabs" that located the grids were removed and a slot-system was implemented to line them up and make the grid positions more screen-accurate. The "leg" pins were moved to position the legs correctly. Simple surface greebles were added to the tops. VTOL engines underneath were moved to the correct position.


The engines were cleaned-up and significantly shortened The engine bells had some minor detailing added, but need to be re-sized slightly.


The octagonal "legs" were slightly re-proportioned, meaning that some circular greebles are now a bit oval!


The main landing gear was shortened to the "compressed" landed state, not the extended "flying" state they were originally in. alpokemon's original versions are readily available, if desired.

All grids were narrowed, meaning the front side grids have slightly oval tubes! Some new tubes replaced old ones, but the cross-hatch detail is still the old narrowed detail. Rear grids completely rebuilt from scratch, tube size is a bit "thick", but it helps in printing!

Printing/Build Notes:

All parts were printed on a factory-stock Ender 3 Max, using Cura 4.10.0* (see below) and cheap Creality "Ender" PLA filament.


The only part that required support was the cockpit (which is printed vertically, like the main pod), that said, a 75-degree limit was used to minimize the support material to where it was relevant. (FYI, the Ender 3 Max's dual-fan print-head is very good at bridging gaps and printing angled surfaces without support)


All parts, except the cockpit and pod, used a 15% infill. To save filament, an 8% infill was used on the cockpit and pod. The grids did not suffer from not using a 100% infill, I suspect they are too small in cross-section for infill to be used in any case.


A lot of parts, like the grids, have very limited surface area where they contact the printing bed, so brims (see photo) are a good idea to avoid having the parts detach from the bed! That said, the grids, engines and engine bells can be successfully printed without brims, but it's risky (50/50 chance of a failure). The larger parts can generally be printed without brims since it eliminates time-consuming post-printing clean-up.


Since the main parts are simply butt-glued together, a wide flat file is your friend! You want the mating surfaces to be smooth and flat.


Use very little glue on the mating surfaces. Press & hold the joint for a few seconds, then if needed, put drops along the joint-lines and it will wick into the void almost instantly.

Cura 4.10.0 (Windows) is still very "twitchy" when it comes to hanging while slicing. More often than not, it will hang forever and not complete a slice operation. I have found that randomly moving/rotating the part on the Cura "virtual" bed and re-slicing will eventually make the slicing work! Sometimes it takes many tries, YMMV...