Sand Castle Mold

This is a sand castle mold that I designed for the purpose of quickly making sand castles at the beach. The model shows the sand castle mold and a 36mm ball (for scale). I'm going to make a game out of this where players make a castle, balance plastic water bottle caps on the towers and then toss foosballs (simulating small canon balls) at other castles to knock them off and score points. I found a 20 pack of 36mm foosballs on-line for $13.

After slicing with Ultimaker at a scale of 77.5% (to create a 6 inch size print) I printed this in PLA on a Creality Ender3-X. The mold (not the ball) was printed open side up, using a brim and 35% infill with supports. FAIR WARNING: Even at 77.5% scale this took 601g of filament and 1 day and 13 hours to print.

My daughter found that filling the mold most of the way with sand, turning it over onto a small pile of sand, pressing down lightly and shaking to pack the sand in and then carefully lifting the mold off worked to make good looking complete sand castles.