Fredrik Stenström

I work in a large scale infrastructure project of building a new subway line. Although we have the most skilled collegues, accurate CAD-drawings, a complete computer based 3D-model and technical documents describing the project I noticed that a lot of people didnt fully grasp the scope of the project. So in my spare time I decided to communicate it even better by building a large scale physical model.

One of the main ideas behind the model was also to visualize the things that cant be visualized so to speak. The idea was born to help communicating the project to people who are visually impaired and came up after working with one of my collegues who lost her eyesight at young age. Creating the full scale model and letting her be able to "see" the project is just such a joy cause now she can recognize herself and speak of all the different parts of the tunnel with everyone just as if she had full vision. Read more about it here: https://nyatunnelbanan.sll.se/sv/artikel/vi-ska-valkomna-alla-med-den-nya-tunnelbanan

But first things first... There is a lot of steps involved in creating such large scale 3D printed model: You need to clean up, connect and split all 3d models in perfect chunks you also have to make sure you have water tight geometry in order to 3D print all the parts. Then you need to rescale everything so it matches when printing it.

A first test print was made with low quality settings and tested aginst a scale drawing to see that it looked correct.

Smaller parts were glued and welded into bigger parts until the full length of the project was achieved. In total there were over 40 printed pieces that had to be connected.

This is just a test measurement to see that the scale was right and that the full size diorama would not be to big.

Next step was to glue a detailed printed map onto wooden boards and drill in pins to connect the 3d print to the right place in the world.

Heres a close up of the pins holding the 3d model in place so that you get teh feeling that it is hoovering over the map.

To get the final touch I added white frame.

The final 3 meter assembled display. Scale 1:1250 Print time: 63hours 31 min in total. Layer height: 0,15 Material: Environment-friendly PLA

Displayed at an office event.

Just some info in swedish on the 3D print process.