Fans of The Simpsons will recognize the family’s house immediately. The yellow house with the brown roof, reddish door, and attached garage has been seen in over 500 episodes since 1989. Designed to be a generic representation of the home of every middle class, suburban American family, the house is famous in its ordinariness. I’d like to know just how many replicas of the house have been built in the last two decades; there’s a LEGO kit, Sims applications, and, in the 1990s, an actual, full-scale, livable replica was built in Nevada.
If you’re a Simpsons fanatic but don’t quite have the means to construct your own life-size replica of the yellow house, you can settle for 3D printing your own version courtesy of Cults3D. The online design platform and marketplace is also a social network of sorts, with a large community of designers, makers, and general fans of 3D printing. Designers share their creations to be downloaded either free of charge or for a small fee. They offer a variety of designs, including a lot of seriously cool skulls, a tricky toy puzzle for dogs, and much more.
One of the site’s newest offerings is from Brazilian designer Paulo Bubolz, who carefully designed a faithful replica of the Simpsons’ house and uploaded it to Cults3D. You can make your own for a mere $2.13, with a level of detail no LEGO replica has ever offered.
Bubolz’s design is meticulous, with operational windows and doors, and even a removable roof if you’d like to add your own furnishings, such as, perhaps, a dangerously unpredictable couch.
He designed the house using SketchUp, and printed it with a Protobot 3D printer, which he carefully calibrated to be able to print the smallest parts with the proper detail. The minimum bed size required for the print, he says, is 20 x 20 x 10, with a maximum nozzle diameter of 0.4mm. Supports, which are required for the windows and door frames, are incorporated in STL, so no outside software supports are necessary.
“You can print all windows together, but will get better results if you print each one individually,” Bubolz suggests. “Print necessarily all small parts with a layer height of 0.18 mm (no more or less) to ensure the removal of the supports easily.”
A quick perusal of Bubolz’s Facebook page shows that he spent well over a month perfecting his design, down to the smallest detail. An impressive log of his work shows that he knows 3D printing and design well, and takes it seriously. His other designs, also documented on Facebook, include some impressive creations such as a metal detector, 3D puzzles, and other models with a meticulous level of detail. His Simpsons house is his first design to be uploaded to Cults3D, but hopefully there will be more coming soon, because he’s an impressive designer.
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