3D Print the Putinator If You Want to Live

The notoriously humorless president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has proven time and time again to be almost completely devoid of a sense of humor. Despite his willingness to stage hilariously obvious photoshoots doing manly man stuff, always shirtless, because in Mother Russia being shirtless means that you’re manly. From riding horseback shirtless, to fishing shirtless, to hunting duck shirtless, to walking in military gear inexplicably shirtless, Putin does a great job of making himself mockable. So mockable in fact that he recently decided that the internet needed to stop, and passed a law banning the use political figures (himself, obviously) in memes. Which is a great idea that is totally going to work.

Because the internet is the internet, Putin’s desire to not be the subject of online jokes has only put a larger target on his manly, horse-riding bare-chest. Truly, nothing will ever match the 3D printed butt-plug of Putin from last year, because it combined two of his least favorite things, gay stuff and being the, well, butt of a joke. But that doesn’t mean that the internet, or 3D printing for that matter, was done with him.

If you think about it, Putin really is a lot more like the Terminator than you would think. Maybe he’s not the unstoppable, quip-dropping, killing machine from the future, but he certainly does a great job of coming off as robotic. It is also practically impossible for Russia to get rid of him, when they don’t want him to be their prime minister any longer, he just becomes their president. And as the designer of the Putinator told me, there doesn’t seem to be a difference between him hosting the Olympics or invading a neighboring country.

When high school junior Nate Birchard was browsing Thingiverse for a new project he stumbled on a battle damaged Terminator model and decided that it would be funny to mix it with a Putin bust that he had seen earlier. The mash-up of the two models seemed like a match made in Meshmixer, which Birchard used to combine the Putin bust with a Terminator skull model that he found. After positioning the models together, he used Blender to sculpt the battle damage wounds, and then merged them into a single 3D object.

“I’ve added the Putinator to my robotics workstation, where he can watch over the computer and 3D printer.  I haven’t gotten a lot of comments on Thingiverse about the model, but all the people I’ve shown it to at my school have found it hilarious,” Birchard told us.

Birchard is a member of his school’s FIRST Robotics team and had access to their Makergear M2 printer. He decided to print Putinator out in ABS with 20% infill in order to save material. The complete print took him about five and a half hours, even with a small nozzle jam that he needed to fix part way through the print. He did very little post processing on the model because he was afraid of losing details, so he simply smoothed the model a little bit and then painted it with a coat of enamel and then acrylic paints.

Naturally Birchard has uploaded the Putinator to Thingiverse so anyone can download and print their very own. And if you do make one, make sure that you take plenty of pictures and share it online for everyone to see. And please post them to our 3D Printed Putinator Bust forum over on 3DPB.com.