Final Tinkercad Project: LEGO Minifigure
For my final Tinkercad project, I made a LEGO minifigure. I decided to build him from the ground up. I used a slightly improved version of my hinge from the moving parts assignment to create the legs. In the first print, the hinge between the legs was too big, so I made it a little smaller and also added the waistline, and it worked perfectly (surprisingly). Because of the ease of designing the legs, I figured that everything else would be easy, especially if I kept the same connector piece proportions.
Next, I made the body. It’s a simple rectangle with two thin triangles cut out the sides. This took the most reprints out of all of them, because I kept trying to print an arm next to it in the same session, and the printer kept making random squiggles about halfway through. After 3 tries and 2 printers, I realized what was up and printed the body alone. It printed fine, except since so much of its surface area was on the table, I spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to take it off. When I did get it off, I tried to fit it to the waist part, and it took about 10 minutes of filing to make it fit in the hole.
Next, I made the arms. This took the longest in design I used the exact same hinge technique from before, and angled the arms a little bit to fit the body shape. I learned that changing dimensions of simple shapes is a little more complicated when it’s at an 11 degree angle, but I figured it out after about an hour. The prints themselves went rather smoothly. I made them yellow to try to emulate the basic yellow LEGO skin tone.
The head was the easiest overall; it’s a beveled cylinder with a peg on top and hole on the bottom, with eyes and a mouth cut out. I wanted to make it yellow, but by that time blue was the only color that didn’t have a major ongoing print, so he is blue.
I put the pieces together and suddenly realized I had a very flawed perception of proportions, especially in the arms being a little too thin, and the upper body being significantly bigger than the legs. I tried reprinting the body smaller and the arms bigger, and it was a nice size, except for the fact that it printed a thick support in the connecting body hole (it didn’t do that before), and the arms were a made little too big and also didn’t fit, so I scrapped that.
Now we are left with a slightly mismatched minifigure, whose hand broke a bit in transport. He can stand on his own and all of his parts move functionally, though, which I assume is what matters most. He’s just a special guy who wears an extra long shirt and likes to paint his face blue.
