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Thank you for your coment Jud! However, I feel that would be counter to my original intent. Printed locally. Our local College has a 3D printer but they will not compete with local businesses. They cannot even offer to do a "one of" for free, even as a teaching aid. It is against policy. I am not looking for perfection. I have yet to create perfection. I see the beauty in the rawness of this piece's imperfection. Having said that, I would not turn my nose up to something that was prettier! I wanted a 3D printed cannon and that is what I got. I think I will try to work with the library first before I might consider any other avenues. I also want to say, you really have to get quite close up to see what shows up in the photos. My display case prevents that. Or possibly my eyes need a re-alignment / adjustment. I will get feed back regarding the aesthetics from the club this Sunday.

I will contact the Library and attempt to meet and discuss with them what they would be wiiling to do and what I might do to improve the end result.

Druxey and Dowmer Thank you for the comments. The printer was set at 1.5mm layer thickness and 20% fill. I confess I do not know if this is good or bad. Trying again vertically in two or three pieces might be worth trying. The insignia could would be applied seperately. I've been watching numerous YouTube videos regarding gluing and smoothing. Thank you again.

Batteries charged but the photos were surprisingly not much better. The only thing that it caught that the phone wouldn't is the royal insignia. I am considering having it printed a second time so I might try sanding one of them.

Well, the batteries in the SLR are almost dead, so while they were recharging we tried with my wife's new fangled phone camera. Following are some results. I did not clean off any of the temporary printing supports so the fit in the carriage was not in anyway perfect. I set the bottom half in the carriage and then placed the top half on it. Both ends seem to bow away from each other but the good news is they pull together with very little force. I also set the cannon balls on the rack. They do not seat properly. The flat plastic foot seemed to have spread out a bit. I measured the ball and diameter wise it is perfect enough but the flat bottom diameter measured larger than it should have been. I will sand these down to fit. You can clearly see the stepped layers in building the pieces. Funny enough though, you only notice it when you get up quite close. Otherwise the look of it is beginning to grow on me. If I were to sand the whole thing down it would be dimensionally inaccurate... and I might possibly ruin it. The third photo shows the first layer being laid out as three outer strings and a wavey filler. So if you sand it will there be holes? I will leave it all untouched for now but I`ve found online (YouTube) that ABS glue works on PLA plastic, and this I have. Apparently you can weld the parts together by brushing solvent (nail polish or acetone) and clamping them together. I will leave it all alone until after our club meeting this weekend.

Picked it up last night at about 8 pm. Photos will be posted much later today. I think I'll need to get out the real camera and ask the resident expert photographer to do this. The finish is nothing like resin casting. There are visible steps from the layers. Makes the finish look like wood grain. According to YouTube it can be dry then wet sanded from 80 to 4000 grit to get it smooth. I will not attempt this until after our meeting this weekend so the club members can see it as is for now. The muzzle end is warped upwards a wee bit on both halves but does pull down. The plastic is at about 350°F when deposited so I imagine it happened when they slipped the spatula under it to separate it from the machine bed.

Inevitable everything did crack because they went from a one piece truck (wheel) tot a four piece and then added a metal retaining ring around the outboard end of the axletree. The idea of greasing the assembly makes sense though I don't seem to notice any trace of it in photos. Something to look into.

About 4 hours. Hope it turns out adequate. Timely as I will have it for our local club meeting this Sunday!

It has been an exciting few days. First I realized the Royal insignia was upside down. Then I struggled to rotate it. Then I managed to get the new file over to the local Library via the internet and they confirmed receipt. Then they contacted me because the STL model was less than 2" long when it should have been 7-1/2" long. Got that all sorted out. Then at 3 PM I get a call that they are starting my print... but they were going to use the old original file. Got that straightened out and just got back from watching the print process. They added support ribs inside the bore to keep the barrel from collapsing on itself and a couple very thin supports under the trunnion to keep them from drooping the small amount between it and the machine bed. I am hoping for a call tonight that it is done and ready to pick up. Worst case I'll get a call tomorrow. Here are a couple pics and a short video. 3D_printing_9Pdr_Cannon.mp4

Mark If you are interested, I might possibly get you one of each size printed for you for free at our local library. This would be for your collection. It is a shame to do all that work for nothing. PM me and we can discuss. Alan

Our local library prints for free but limits the file size to 8Mb as it takes them 5 hours to print that size. I submitted my file two weeks ago this Tuesday and am still waiting.

You are very welcome. Happy I finally could help someone. Use the windows snipping tool and capture the screen image so others can see. Sometimes I just take a pic with my phone and use it after resizing with MS Paint.

Mark, try increasing the deviation. Druxey, adding a radius (softening the edges) of such a complex shape would be, IMHO, nightmarish for the 3D. It needs to calculate the whole mess and if you haven't a NASA computer the humble home computer will likely crash.

I sometimes find the program suggests you have joined one line to another... but it did not. It stopped short and left a gap or it went beyond and overlapped the line. To get away from this I purposefully draw the line beyond so I can see it and then trim it back. Extra work but it keeps me from banging my head against the wall and throwing the monitor out the window! 😠

Have you selected SHELL as opposed to SOLID?

looking at photos I would have sworn they were bare wood. see below

I attempted to draw a segment of a tube above the trunnion at both ends of the insignia at locations of known diameters. I then attempted to loft and cut using the two sketches and a 3D line connecting the two as a rail. My program (Inventor) does not seem to want to cut away with the loft command. With my second attempt... If I cut away a Rotated (tube) segment drawn on the XZ plane above the trunnion that is successful. As the trunnion is below the horizontal plane it is below the cutaway and is not touched.

ordered my copy yesterday!

the other option might be to apply the insignia flat, protruding from the surface and then manually file or sand it round after printing. I was told that 3D printing is an open honeycomb cell structure below the thin solid surface so you might have to use some type of filler afterwards.

Just answered your question at:

Mark Every 3D CAD program is different. If your program will do it there should be an option to WRAP to a surface and you will be prompted to pick the surface. This is what it looks like in Autodesk Inventor...

"too much time on my hands" ? If it hadn't be for me wasting an afternoon surfing You Tube I would have thought much about the sled. I started surfing because I just couldn't live with the sunken and too wide a gap shoe plate and needed to make a new useful one.

exhaust??? it doesn't go any faster. I did however give some thought to hooking my vacuum hose to it

I have a Mastercraft table saw bought from Canadian Tire a few years ago. It needed a zero clearance insert plate as the one supplied accommodated angle cuts and it also sat below the deck surface which caused me some grief. I made my new plate out of oak... good and hard and flush with the table top, and it has made a world of difference. I then made a Cross Cut Sled and added an adjustable stop block. To improve on this I mounted my old (never used again) vernier caliper instead of a measuring tape. The pin that locks the fixed end of the vernier is an old worn out drill bit. So a drilled the hole with a new one and I knew it would be a perfect fit. The moving side is locked to the stop block by a profile plate on one side and a rotating locking cam on the other. As an after thought I drilled another hole to keep the cam Allen Key in as I am sure I would spend 20 minutes or more looking for it otherwise. This vernier reads to only two decimal places and has an accuracy of only +/- 0.01 inches. This is fine enough for quite a few of my cuts. The saw can only be raised 1-1/2 inches for this sled so it will be used on small stuff. I did not invent this sled... I found a version on YouTube and made some small improvement.

At 1:64 won't they all look very similar?