Number of Shells Display by duncan916

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is one of a series of educational displays I made for the Arcade Library in Sacramento to help teach people about 3D printing.
It can be difficult to explain important 3D printing concepts like printing with supports, the effect of the number of shells, resolution, infill percentage and using a raft.
Sometimes all you need is a good visual aid to make things click.
This is a shell display that shows the effect of different "number of shells" settings. A one inch cube is printed ten times with various settings. Cubes with 1-5 shells are on one row and then 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 shells are on the next row. It is easy to see how the number of shells effects the stability of a print and the translucency.
There is enough space between the cubes to squeeze them to feel how flexible or ridged they are.
It's a great way to quickly find out how many shells you should use for your project.
See the instructions for details on how to make this display for your classroom or wherever else it is useful.