3D Printing a Life Size Replica of Aristotle's Bust

Being a philosophy teacher and an art lover, I wanted to a bust of Ludovisi's Aristotle in the  Museo Nazionale Romano (it's on the cover of so many of our texts!). However, I really wanted to get as close to life size as possible so I had to scale ScanTheWorld file to the right size. While I could not find the exact dimensions, I found posted dimensions for the head of Lysippos' Aristotle which this was likely a copy of. Once scaled, I found that I could carefully slice the bust to print a complete head on my Ender3. From there I had to slice the alabaster bust into 12 parts with the pedestal base as a single piece. I then added alignment pins to all the sliced pieces. I started with 1 large cubic alignment for the head and the pedestal before switching to smaller cylindrical alignment pins within the bust. The large cubic pin allowed me to: 1) separate the bust from the pedestal for ease of transport; 2) easily open the base to fill it with concrete (making the final bust less top heavy). From there I sliced all the files using Cura's "lightning infill" (which remarkably looked neurons inside Aristotle's head!) to save on filament. Overall very little supports were needed and I was able to print everything with ~2,000kgs of filament (not including discarded errors, like accidently printing the same piece 2x). Once all the pieces and the alignment pins, I assembled and glued all the pieces together, spot puttied the seams, and sanded. Some layerlines are still visible since I had to balance smoothness and loss of detail in his hair, beard, etc. In the paint booth, I primed the bust and then painted the head a cooler marble color (I even tried to replicate the brown cracking around the nose). Then I bagged Aristotle like you see in movies and masked off his neckline to airbrush orange, browns and whites to imitate alabaster. Once satisfied I sealed him with a clear coat. Now he sits in my office at DeSales University for students coming in for office hours!

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