I thought it was a homage to a puzzle from The Witness, hence the apple “for scale”. Even now that I know it isnt I still cant unthink it.

Edit : just scrolled down and somebody else did the same thing and also included a screenshot.

He was printing a tree for his model train set. No idea what the wall behind it is for

I agree. In fact, that’s what I tend to do - slice up a design by splitting the body/bodies and printing test pieces where tolerances matter. Things like latches, hinges, pieces that have to fit with one another, etc. I’m not sure how practical this approach would have been for this print due to its final orientation, but it’s a really good practice.

I think I got a bit too comfortable with things going per plan over my last batch of designs :( I’ll also admit to being in a bit of a time crunch. No deadline, but I have younger kids so time to model and print is somewhat limited. This is a good reminder that rushing can actually make things take longer in the end.

Massaging this print to fit wasn’t practical. Despite being off by 1% that’s still 2mm of material to remove over some pretty big spans. I did take a chisel to the cutout, but man is ASA tough. PETG is much easier to do that with lol.

Thanks re: print looks great. It’s super solid, so I’m very happy in that regard. I don’t know about you, but lighting greatly impacts how the surface quality of my prints look. Hard/direct light at a steep vertical angle makes the faces look pretty rough, but more diffuse light coming from the side makes the parts look great. I am not sure if this is normal, especially for a larger CoreXY with long 6mm wide a/b belts, or if this is something I can dig into and improve.

It’s a stand to somewhat elevate and angle the speakers I used with my computer.

I’ll follow up with another post in a day or two with the finished product.

I put this in another reply, but I know not everyone will pop back into the thread so…

I completely agree with your approach and that’s what I would usually do. The print is probably off by 1%, which over these spans is 2mm. Massaging this print to fit isn’t really practical :(

In my experience, broken tree branches come from:

• Crazy angles on the supports. This happens when a support needs to ‘grow’ over the print in order reach the thing it needs to support. This ultimately comes down to part geometry, so there’s not a ton you can do here if you can’t change the geometry or orientation of the part
• Poor bed adhesion causing the trunk to separate from the bed. Clean your bed with dish soap and dry it with paper towels. Make sure you have a good first layer by getting your your bed and gantry in parallel planes and double check your z-offset. Bonus points if you can do a bed mesh between prints
• The extruder catching on a branch and breaking it off. This is usually due warping or over-extrusion. Warping can be its own rabbit hole. Over-extrusion is easy to tune for, especially if your slicer has built in calibration aids (eg OrcaSlicer, SuperSlicer, etc)
• An ambitious slicer not making the supports themselves very strong. Slicers these days seem to avoid thin/tall trees, but they’re still usually single perimeter. I’ve configured my slicer to use 0.6mm thick walls on supports
• If you have a bed slinger, tall supports can wobble. Slowing down acceleration/jerk is really the only way to combat this

Obviously, these can all be a bit interrelated.

The support in this print is basically vertical (no crazy angles), I generally have great bed adhesion/my printer can mechanically make its gantry in plane with the bed/I run a bed mesh every print/I use klipper_z_calibration to get a consistent first layer, nothing’s warping and I’ve tuned my extrusion multiplier for this spool of filament, the support itself is strong due to its girth at the base and wall thickness, and CoreXY means that the support doesn’t really move unless the extruder is dragging some.

Sadly, almost is relative. The dimensions were off by say 1%, but over larger spans that’s 1-2mm.

I am not at all opposed to taking heat and/or tools to prints to massage them vs tossing the first go and printing fresh, but that wasn’t practical here :(