3d Printed Hubble Telescope

In this instructable I am gonna explain to you how to 3d print the Hubble space Telescope.

You will need the following things:

- a 3d printer (you can also order parts with me throug this link: https://www.3dhubs.com/turnhout/hubs/kfreprap)

- small tools like a knife and some pliers

- a strong kind of glue (i think superglue is the best choice)

- a 3d printing material of your choice, you will need about 35 cm³ of material (i used 1,75mm PLA)

- something like a vise to clamp the parts while drying

The first and easiest method is to find a drawing on the internet. Ofcourse you can use drawings from any site like thingiverse, but I, and i thing you to, want my drawings as authentic and realistic as possible.

So, we go to a site like: http://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov, this is a site from the US governement where you can find 3D drawings of their satelites, telescopes and parts of the surface of mars and the moon.

Here I chose the hubble telescope which you can also find in this instructable.

Since this is something totaly different and much harder to do, I will make an instructable about this later.

But, if you have a lot of pictures of the satelite you want to make, you can use this tutorial from JuiceW:

https://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-3D-model-from-pictures/

This is a very critical step, since this will seriously affect the look of our print.

- The resolution: These models are very complex, but, since the US governement can't publish exact drawings because of safety reasons, the drawings only have an average resolution. I used 100 micron, but you could go lower to 200 micron.

- The print speed: This kind of depends on what printer you are using, but keep it low. Especially for the first layers, otherwise some parts wil be riped of the print bed. I used 25mm/s.

- Support: You will definetly need support. Some parts will fall over without it.

- Temperature: This totaly depends on you and your printer. I used 200°C for the nozzle and 60°C for the bed.

Not much explanation needed here. I thing you now what to do now.

I do suggest to print from an sd card, since these prints take a few hours to complete and you don't want them to fail because of an error on you pc. As you can see in the picture above, I had a fail when i was printing all the parts at the same time because i didn't use my sd card back then.

We are almost there, but don't get to exited. If you use to much force now, you can start all over again.

Take a small, sharp knife and some small pliers to carefully remove the prints from the print bed. Next you can remove the support material. But again, be carefull.

If you chose to print something like the hubble telescope, you have multiple parts which need to be assembled. You can do this with superglue, epoxy, acetone if you printed with ABS, ... I do not recomend you to use a very thick glue like hot-glue, because it wont give a nice and clean finish and could possibly ruin your print.