3D Printed Action Figure

I have always had an interest in action figures ever since I can remember. I had many as a kid and would play with them all the time. There are a lot of ideas that can be expressed through toy making and a lot to learn from designing them. The reason to make this came from requirement from a school project and my personal interests.

This instructable will be going through my process of brainstorming, designing, printing, and my final thought of this action figure toy.

1. Acess to a 3D printer.
2. PLA filament
3. CAD software
4. Slicer software
5. Time

In my case I used a Elegoo Neptune 3 pro, Inland PLA filament, Onshape, Elegoo Cura Slicer, and in total about 100 hours.

I actually started my first design without a drawing and built a friction connected toy with a total of six pieces. This was mainly an initial test of my skills with onshape (CAD) and my printer. The picture with the action figure (robot) legs spread out was the first print when I realized tolerances are going to be very important to consider. This prototype worked well with friction holding but it was not much of a toy. It could not move and the connections were either very tight or loose between pieces.

This design drawing was not helpful for the modeling but helped me narrow down what I wanted to do. I wanted this toy to be able to move, to have the ability to be actually be played with. So I new the best way to do that would be ball joints. Which I initially planned to have 12 different joints. At the shoulders, elbows, hands, hips, knees, and ankles. This drawing does not look like the final design but helped me get a better idea of what I wanted.

This was my seconds design where I added ball joints at the shoulders and hips. This allowed for ability to pose the action figure. This was a good start but still far from what I wanted.

I added hands and feet to this version while also including a new designed head that was on a ball joint of its own. How it did this was the addition of a ball joint at the end of each limb and a circle hole in the hands and feet. This is another moment when tolerances became challenging to deal with. I want the hands and feet to stay snug and not move around unless you moved them. But to do that I needed to make them a tight fit which was about a 0.4mm of tolerance between the joint and the holes. This caused many hands and feet to break when trying to put them on but once they were on they fit great. I fixed this issue by spending time sanding the joints. But making sure I did not over sand was challenging.

Before I get to the end I want to talk about two design that I deemed were "failed designs". This was during the longest part of this project which is when I was trying to figure out how to make elbow and knee joints that could do all I wanted. I wanted them to be able to fully bend. My first two designs a these joints were a ball joint (right photo) and a pin connected joint (left photo).The ball joint was scrapped due to me not knowing how I could make this fully bend without making a very difficult piece to 3D print. The pin connection has less movement ability as the ball joint but allowed for a more seamless design. But the pins did not hold very well in the part and would fall out. I also experimented with a hip ball joint that made that chest and hip two different pieces that could now rotate around each other.

From looking at these designs I thought what if I took out the pin and place a ball like joint that could fit into those holes. This would keep the connector from falling out but also still give the movement ability to move up and down.

This design is my final design for this project. It has everything I wanted except the elbows and knee can not rotate just move up and down. But I also added a head joint and hip joint that I did not think about in the concept phase. Many of the parts in this had many different design in each version. The arms themselves had over 50 different changes to them. This final design to me could actually be considered a action figure, I even experimented with different tools for it like swords and shields.

This was a very fun project to work on, I learned a lot and will definitely continue to improve this design. I have built skill using CAD software and troubleshooting 3D printing. I feel as though I have improved my problem solving skills and I am proud of the work I did.

I plan on editing this action figure in the future by adding rotation the elbows and knees and fixing the tolerances.