Gromit Headphone Hook

James wanted a hook for his headphones and because William already has a duck themed hook he wanted a character as well. What I didn’t expect was he wanted a Wallace & Gromit themed hook – Challenge accepted.

The Model

Searching through Thingiverse I found Robert Hagstroms full model of Gromit and didn’t expect a lot due to its size and was expecting to use it more as a guide / template to create my own model.

However on importing this tiny model into Fusion 360 I found its an extremely detailed part which allowed me to scale it up without loosing any features. Hats off to you Robert this model is perfect.

I then set to in Fusion 360, slicing Gromits head off and and re-angling it to allow for a pair of headphones to sit on without sliding off, I then added two wall hooking points and done, easy win. We now had the “Gromit Headphone Hook”

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Printing

As you will see from the slicer image I didn’t quite get my scaling correct and had to print it at 97% to allow it to fit my print bed. I printed with ICE filaments green as I had a nearly full reel from another project. Sliced the model to 0.2mm 15% infill with no supports and set it going. The print took just over 15 hours to complete and could have been less if I had used 10% infill.

Finishing & Painting

As you can probably guess from my other posts finishing isn’t my favorite task. Due to the print quality being rather good

even for 0.2mm layer height I only gave the model the shortest of sands before applying a few coats of spray on filler.

Using acrylic paint in my airbrush I covered the body and ears evenly. But mixing the colours was a challenge, especially for the off cream body colour Gromit has. I utilized a lovely site that allows you to play with mixing colours online which gives you at least a base mix ratio to start with and some knowledge of what happens if you add / remove colours or volumes.

My base mix turned out as White 40, Yellow 7 , Blue 1 and Red 1 (parts), using these ratios I created the basic colour mix and adjusted it to be what I wanted, using the WEB app as a guide. I’m quite pleased with the result.

After covering the body with the new colour I set to and mixed a dark brown for the ears, this colours a lot easier to achieve. Using frog tape masking tape and paper I masked off everything else before spraying on the colour. We do find the frog tape to be gentle to the paint its applied to for both projects like this and home decorating.

The nose I masked off but decided to apply the paint by brush to give a thicker covering and painted the eyes by hand as its too tricky to get in with masking tape.

Once painted and left to fully dry the whole model is sealed with a clear matt sealer to protect it.

The Result

The end result is really quite good considering the minimal time and effort I put in, one evening on Fusion 360 an overnight print and the painting was spread out over a whole afternoon the next day. One happy boy.