3D Printed Posable "Fidget" Snowmen
What started out as a desire to make some cute Christmas presents for family and teammates at work turned into an all out Christmas decoration 3D printing frenzy. These are not our designs, but original works by another creator found when looking for Christmas STL files to print. The originals are four years old as of this writing (2025).
The original creator then published a "remix" of giant snowmen, and they are truly giant sized! Just the bottom "snowball" would occupy nearly the entire print volume of the old Tevo Tarantula Pro printer. Not to mention the 13 hour print time estimate and half a spool of filament. The giant sized ones we had to "half" size because they are just too big.
That half sizing of the giant snowmen caused a number of unforeseen problems that didn't surface until trying to assemble one of our half sized ones. But it's not really half sized... More like half sized in three dimensions, so basically 1⁄8th sized. But to keep things less confusing, I'm just telling the slicer to scale the STL models to 50% in each dimension.
Just scaling the STL models isn't the right thing to do when it comes to threads though. I'm not sure what size they started out as, but they're definitely not a standard size now. Unfortunately, my go to drawing program, SketchUp, doesn't handle curved objects very well. It definitely doesn't support threads, at least not natively.
I've been meaning to learn how to use FreeCAD, telling myself that I'll use it for our next project, but always falling back into the old, familiar SketchUp to save time. But the time has come. Not only do I get to learn how to use FreeCAD, I get to learn how to make threaded parts in FreeCAD. Thankfully the learning curve only sets me back a few days.
In the end I have the remixed parts I need and a rudimentary understanding of FreeCAD to boot. With that out of the way, the only other setbacks are 3D printer failures. Mainly clogged nozzles on the old printer and a failed filament runout and extruder jam sensor sensor on the new one. It takes some research, but I eventually figure out what's happening and just disable the sensor.
Next step is experimenting with various other filaments, like glitter silver and silk green. Once I turned off the fuzzy setting in the slicer, that silk green looks shiny, like a Christmas tree ornament. That prompts other combinations, like "Silver and Gold". If you would like to read more about it along with much more detail, check out our Blog post...
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