Pre assembled stegosaurus by Makerbot

The models from the fossil collections by makerbots are masterpieces.

I kept running into a problem while assembling each one of them, parts would not fit together.

I printed them in resin, always downscaled between 50 and 65 per cents

Those factors resulted in very clean and stunning assembled skeletons, but at times, very tedious assembling sessions. Up until the point of trying to put together the stegosaurus, and being incapable of doing so as the holes for the ribs simply did not exist in the part I got out of the printer.

So I arrived at the conclusion that the only way to get a stegosaurus would be to do a lot of assembly in CAD

Admittedly I had already pre assembled the tail and back of the Trex when I was building it.

The issue with trying to do that Meshmixer was not allowing for it, and the auto align tool in Fusion was doing a great job but the files were too heavy for my computer and I repeatedly lost hours of work to crashes of the whole PC while trying to export or save my progress.

Then I discovered something awesome .

If you import a part in Meshmixer and place it however you want then export it as an stl, then import it into Fusion and import parts to assemble with it, as long as you do not touch part A, if you place part B, export it as an stl and import this new stl in Meshmixer, part B will be exactly where you placed it in Fusion in regards to part A. And Meshmixer will handle exporting complex assemblies without crashing.

So I ended up placing each rib, exporting it as a separate stl and importing everything in meshmixer afterwards to combine the whole thing and export.

Than way a crash was making me loose minutes of work, not hours.

But given how much I would have loved having pre assembled files before having to do it on my own, and that the many long hours I had to spend assembling it should not go to waste by serving just me, here I am publishing the files.

Assembling this whole rib cage plus spine plus plaques took me 3 whole days, consisting mostly of waiting for the computer to unfreeze or waiting for it to reboot.

You will still need your trusty dremel to assemble this.

Of course those files are only intended to be used by people operating resin printers !