This week’s selection is the War Rig Truck by the folks from Honeybadger 3D print and paint.
This enormous 3D print is based on the famous truck used in Mad Max: Fury Road, which appeared in one of the most notable chase scenes in movie history. The final model is an amazing 1.9m long (75 inches).
As you might imagine, this is a very involved project, with plenty of parts and lots of finishing required. In fact, the project requires 100 separate 3D printed parts.
These files are from Gambody, which markets the model as “War Rig Tanker 3D Printing Model”, and they charge a measly US$29.99 to download the entire project. While that might be a lot more than the “free” cost of many 3D models we feature here, it’s a fraction of the price of the project in total.
Honeybadger says the parts are mostly 3D printing on moderately-sized 3D printers, such as the Ender 3, but that a couple of parts required a larger bed size and a 400 x 400 mm 3D printer was used.
Why would Gambody sell a 3D printer project with parts that wouldn’t fit on a typical 3D printer? The answer is this: they don’t.
It turns out that Honeybadger wanted a very big model, so they upscaled all the Gambody parts to 170% of their original size. Instead of a 1.1m truck, they ended up with a 1.9m truck, and that’s why a few of the tanker pieces didn’t fit.
They say the project took an incredible 32kg of filament, with around 4kg dedicated to support material. They spent 1,000 hours 3D printing all these parts, but evidently spread the load across five different 3D printers, so it was done faster than you might suspect.
For finishing, the Honeybadger guys used a combination of painting techniques, including airbrushing. The result is admirable!
If you’re interested in following the progress of this project from end-to-end, they published a series of videos taking you through their journey. Here they are, in order:
Finally, while this model is impressive, I’m wondering where one would keep it. Everyone involved in 3D printing is overflowing with completed 3D prints, and there’s no shelf space left here. For this truck you’d need a spare table!
