The Brief:
We set out to create a 3D printed replica of The Dolphin — the iconic Cleethorpes building — using its original architectural drawings. Our aim? To honour the past while inspiring the future.
This replica wasn’t just for display. It was designed as an interactive tool to help school-age children learn about heritage restoration through hands-on play with a modern twist.
The model needed to:
Be built from interlocking blocks that children could assemble
Suit a classroom setting, both in scale and durability
Stay true to the building’s colour scheme: slate grey roofing, white-framed windows, and terracotta red brickwork
Challenges:
As with any ambitious project, we encountered a fair share of hurdles, particularly when it came to design and production.
Design:
One of the biggest challenges Chris faced was transforming multiple flat, 2D architectural drawings into an accurate 3D model. Capturing fine details at such a small scale was no small feat, especially while ensuring every piece was printable and would fit together seamlessly. The complexity was heightened by the fact that the original buildings aren’t all the same height — and the ground they sit on isn’t level either.
Printing:
Most of the complications cropped up during the printing stage. With 16 different buildings to replicate, and each kit made up of 81 individual parts, we were looking at a total of 1,296 components to produce, and track.
Maintaining our high standard of print quality meant building in contingencies: we printed extras of most parts to account for potential failures. As with any large print run, we had to assume a failure rate of around 5%, which adds up quickly at this scale.
Technical Failures:
If you’ve watched any 3D printing videos on social media, you are probably very aware that the printers come with a lot of problems, that often cannot be avoided, and this project was definitely not devoid of them.
The main one that Chris had was when a small piece of metal broke off a PTFE Connector, and found its way into the nozzle, clogging it. This caused a repeated problem because it not only clogged it, but also wore the bore of the nozzle through. This then meant that many prints failed and the print quality reduced, with we were not happy about, as quality is a huge priority of ours.
We replaced the nozzle and the Extruder with a hardened nozzle so that we wouldn’t suffer the same wear and tea in the future.
Lessons Learned:
In the future, we will also aim to have spare parts kept on hand at all times. This is important because whilst we waited for replacement parts to arrive, we had to use several other printers that weren’t as reliable as the Bambu.
We would also have better planning and tracking, to prevent the overwhelm we both suffered keeping up with what had been done, and what was still needed. This would include having better processes in place to remove supports from pieces progressively, rather than all together, at the end of the project.
