Kevin Caron shows his large format 3D-printed sculpture Mount Glacier. He says it’s cool for several reasons.
First, printed in blue translucent PLA filament, it is so translucent you can almost see right through it – you can see his hand moving behind it. Mount Glacier has no internal support inside of it, making it extremely translucent.
Second, if you get really close to the sculpture you can see some of these joints where different towers came together. He shows where two of the sculpture’s five towers separate from one another and start to go in different directions.
Kevin Caron explains that there is a little problem inside for 3D printing where the towers meet, because the printer is going to want some kind of support, some kind of webbing, or cribbage, inside inside.
When it comes to a new joint where the towers start to separate, the 3D printer needs something to put that first couple of lines of filament onto. Otherwise the molten filament will just fall in. Then the joint that you’re trying to make is going to fail or just be a big ugly mess.
Kevin Caron created another sculpture, Sunscraper, that is very similar to Mount Glacier except it was yellow and slightly larger. On that sculpture, he actually had to put his hand under the filament to allow it to cool sufficiently in the right position.
Then he found a metal spatula in the kitchen that he used to allow the filament to cool across the open area. And that worked perfectly.
What really drew Kevin Caron to this form as he was creating it in CAD software was the ability to start pulling up squares, turning them into pyramids. The more he played, the more grand, the more majestic the form became.
After looking at it from every angle, Kevin Caron just had to print it on his 8-foot-tall Cerberus 3D Gigante 3D printer. “I was right,” he said. “It’s cool. It has a certain presence. It just says, ‘I’m me, and you need to know me.'”
Kevin Caron is ready to go back to designing in CAD, so you have time to visit https://kevincaron.com to see more free how to videos and his wild sculpture.
Well, you might want to stick around another moment to see where 3D prints come from ….