One of our members, Ian, has an awesome hobby and that hobby is 3D printing. While we were putting together our new big layout we paid a trip to Ians house to raid his parts boxes for vintage pieces and whilst we were there we got a tour of the Lego / Printing room. We noted how good his models are and that it could be really cool to be able to have some upscaled printed models of the vintage parts. We settled on a selection of the vintage “stiff” figures and a tree. Initially we thought it could be really cool to have the figures appropriately sized that children could have a photo taken stood next to them, but we we scaled this to the tree, we realised that it was going to be incredibly large, so it was settled on a 10x scale for all.

The figure parts needed to be drawn in CAD and as I use this on a regular basis I took on the challenge of designing the parts needed. The tree has been designed to be printed in sections and slots together using wedges and supports (also printed). The first attempt did not go too well during assembly and I got everything wedged in the wrong place. We managed to get it apart and some tweaks to the files and a reprint of the support bars resulted in a much easier assembly.

The figures proved quite simple to draw and we have designing and printed a few of the different version available.

A massive thank you to Ian for perservering with the idea, what with my constant tweaks to the files and stating ‘It would be cool if we could do…’

If you are interested in anything then please go check out his instagram account, QBricker3D.