On Teacher Appreciation week, I’m remembering my elementary school teacher Ms. Harrelson, who said nothing has to be perfect; just give it a shot and see what happens.

Unfortunately for Ms. Harrelson, I made something on Monday and it’s basically perfect. This was really exciting because it was one of the first things I made with my new Replicator, I barely changed the default settings, and it printed flawlessly the first time. Behold, my apple.

Apple by jbakutis

This started with the purely awesome Original Apple logo in 3D by acen. I wanted to photograph some of our people here offering an apple to a teacher they really liked. But acen’s has a bite taken out of it. First I discussed with the design guys how we could change this into a dualstrusion model, with a red peel, and natural colored fruit on the inside. Jason suggested another route: why not split acen’s model in half and mirror it to get a whole apple?

Bing, bang, boom.

I made this on a Replicator at 0.27mm layer height, feed rate of 55, 5% infill. I wanted something that would look good from a distance in a picture, but I’m telling you this thing looks beautiful. No cracking, no irregularities, and honest to goodness practically no effort. In Replicator G, under Scale, I clicked on “Fill Build Space!” – or in other words, I Keith-ed it¹ . This made the model 6” tall, so I scaled down by 0.7 to get an apple that’s just over 4 inches tall. For this, we made the leaf a separate piece, so this isn’t a dualstrusion file.

Sminnee asked on Thingiverse if I used any support material, but the answer is no. I might add another shell if I make it again; I just used one this time. I wonder if the very top, right where the leaf piece fits snugly into the apple itself, would have looked smoother with a little more structure in that area. One of our modelers, Jason, thought the model should have a hole all the way through the center of it. This gives the stem area, which dips down, a little beam of internal support.

But on account of the hole all the way through, this is also now a possible jewelry piece.

There are several fruit pieces, fruit bowls, and other accessories on Thingiverse (listed below). So here’s one more for your collection, or perhaps you think your mom would want a fruit bowl on Sunday. Enjoy!

Untitled by madebydan

This thing brought to you by

Untitled by diegoego

This thing brought to you by

Untitled by Prattotyper

This thing brought to you by

Untitled by mraiser

This thing brought to you by

Untitled by cawalke3

This thing brought to you by

Untitled by AbFabFab

This thing brought to you by

Untitled by Viztu

This thing brought to you by

1. not surprisingly, I did this at Keith’s suggestion. [↩]