Orb-weaver spider pendant-brooch

(With free download and SolidWorks tutorial)

My sweet girlfriend Mrs. Mastermind is like no other woman. Most ladies love to receive flowers, all sorts of bijouterie and other “ordinary female requests”, but not she.

Mrs. Mastermind just loves spiders. Paintings, sculptures or real spiders! So, because I know and I can create artistic sculptures I had an idea how to make unusual jewelry with SolidWorks program and print it with 3D printer extruder.

But suddenly three problems emerge:

Solidworks isn’t designed for artistic sculptures;
Extrusion 3D printers don’t leave a sufficiently smooth surface and are using supports, after which the marks remain.
The smooth surface can be made with ABS plastic and acetone steam, but I use 3D printer, which does not have a heat bed needed for the ABS plastic.

So I chose to draw a brooch that could still be used as a pendant on both sides. In order to make an interesting and not boring spider, I thought of decorating it with a cross and a few stripes (it’s a common spider in Lithuania). Here you can watch how to draw such creation using Solidworks or another vector engineering drawing program.

Finally: We can change it’s color, for example, in black and see how it would look. As you can see, the body of the spider keeps the shape in line with the imaginary lines of the circle and ellipse. It looks quite cool, quite similar to a live spider.

I’ve printed this spider using black PLA plastic and with these settings:

Rafts – on,
Supports – on,
Layers – 0,1 mm (0,004 in),
Infill – ~15%,
Number of shell – 2.

After printing, the spider itself had a lot of plastic webs stuck on its body and it took a good hour to clean all the supports and threads with a knife. The spider was surprisingly solid. I was a little afraid that it could easily break legs, but in the end, everything was great.
Now all you have to do is to put the hook and here’s the up-close look at the orb-weaver spider. I think it’s suitable not only as an ornament or jewelry piece, but also to scare someone with it. But it would be a pity if it would be destroyed in the frightened reaction. Better use flexible 3D printing filaments in order to make it into Halloween spider mode.

My lady endlessly enjoyed finding him hidden in a wooden house, which I gave her for Christmas, but I will write about the house later… 😉

So if you like this 3D model and you would love to print it yourself you can order it already printed in Shapeways or you can download STL files from 3DExport: