So there has been a lot of tinkering at BoxBoxBoxCo over the past few months, experimenting with 3D design and 3D printing with these magical machines. But after working hard on some ideas, it was time to have some fun.
- Problem – shelf space, too big for displaying a ‘normal’ 1:18 scale model
- Fix – get a massive F1 model car
You could go shopping and buy one of the amazing, hand-finished 1:8 scale models, but they are so incredible they cost upwards of £10,000… so it was time to make full use of the 3D printer and experiment with some files from the brilliant car-mad 3D designer, STL-Labs.
You can have a browse of STL Labs’ work here – there are even some free files to download, I did a few of the little ones, but then decided to go big and grab that 1:10 scale modern, 2026 style F1 car.
But, remember the problem, I had a large shelf area and it would like better to have one big cat there, so yeah, let’s take that CAD file and scale it up… so I took the largest piece and scaled it as large as the printer could handle and then applied the same to each of the other 40+ parts and planned the printing… it took over 200hrs!
That was a lot of overnight prints. And much experimentation to make the shiny, flexible, rubber-like tyres too. But the end result is quite insane. I even surprised myself at the sheer size of the thing.
You can see the full build in the video on instagram here.
What next? Maybe I’ll do one with a livery, or go back to a proper, 90s style F1 car, hmmm… decisions.
