Completing the Sculpture:

Printing: I printed the parts on my P2S and they came out perfectly, it took a little bit longer as I slowed it down to reduce the noise and the jittering as I slept next to the printer and this just made it more difficult to hear and in my experience it is actually the printer finishing which wakes me up more than the actual printing keeping me from sleeping. Overall, it took about 4.5 hours to print and the parts came out very nice and I decided to flip each part to have the lovely texture on the top which granted is not very F1 aero efficiency and all that jazz but it looks cool.

Cleanup: I got the prints off the plate and despite them looking fantastic I felt some cleanup was needed. To do this I used both the edge of a metal ruler and a Stanley blade to scrape - not cut/trim - the layer lines on the sides, this works almost like a card scraper in furniture making and removes this top layer, removing layer lines and most importantly for me doesn’t discolour the plastic like sanding typically does and as I wasn’t going to be painting the main car bits - I needed there to be no discolouration. For a couple of the external radius sections I did pull out the sanding stick but this has - supposedly - 60 micrometer gritt, don’t know what it means but it is really smoot and doesn’t discolour the plastic.

Creating the base: To create the base I started with a piece of 4mm ply and cut it to size on the bandsaw before skinning both sides of this with some carbon fibre weave vinyl. This part also had a small hole drilled in the middle by hand and I fitted the cylinder to hold up the main section of the sculpture.

Paintwork: Minimal paintwork was needed and I simply masked off on the rear shark fin section and then painted the white dashes - obviously not adding the MASSIVE BLUE HP LOGOS. YES THE MASSIVE ONES. THE REALLY MASSIVE ONES.

Shaping: To shape the parts I used a heat gun and then folded the sections over the edge of the table. Unfortunately, I did end up folding the headrest/cockpit area the wrong way round but it was reasonably easy to correct with reheating it.

Finally I glued it all together on the plinth and it was done:

Building a Sculpture: Earlier today I saw a similar idea to this on the internet for the new regulation cars and so I thought that I should give it a go and make one myself. I however don’t have access to the laser equipment and metal bending that the original creator uses and so decided to 3D print the item. This product will be relatively simple but it definitely challenged me in thinking in multiple dimensions with it being modelled as flat sheets that I then went and bent later with the intention of printing flat and then either eyeballing the bending with a heat gun or also making a former - probably just going to eyeball it. The modelling was reasonably enjoyable. When modelling I started with the base plate to get a sense of scale to the workplace - which will be fake carbon fibre skinned with a chrome border. After this I uploaded the canvases from head and then just began tracing out some shapes. I think I I were to do this again - I would print and trace the overall profiles from the form of the f1 car by hand onto a separate sheet of paper to make this step easier. This was repeated with each part which makes up the main sections of an F1 car other than the wings as I wanted it to be very simplistic much like the inspiration. Finally, I duplicated the parts and bent them to shape to produce a render before exporting the flat files which are currently printing.