Flexi Northern Snakehead [Channa Argus]

Update: Added 2 new color schemes, blue and grayscale! [05Jun25]

Please Read Filament Warning at the bottom before printing

Native to Southeast Asia, China, and Russia, the Northern Snakehead now has established populations on the east coast of the United States, especially in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. These fish have a labyrinth lung allowing them to breathe air, survive on land for extended periods of time, and wiggle their way from one body of water for another. They also spawn up to 5 times per year with broods of up to 1500 eggs. These characteristics have allowed the fish to spread rapidly and decimate native populations of fish and amphibians as they go. This however creates a great opportunity for anglers, there is no bag limit on snakehead so you can keep as many as you can catch! People even bowfish for these invasive fish in the shallows that they have dominated.

Now that the ecology lesson is over, let's get to the model!

This flexi fish is split in half and can be glued together after printing by aligning the square slots on the bottom with the registration block. Warning: Do not remove the print from the plate until it's completely cooled! Early removal can warp the bottom and the slightest warping will prevent the pieces from fitting together properly. Holding the two halves together with tape as the glue dries can help maintain alignment of the tail pieces. 

While each half is very flexible, some of that flexibility is lost when the two halves are glued together. Gluing only the head and tail pieces together and leaving the top and bottom fin interfaces free can improve flexibility. I added vertical slats between connector units to improve strength. The model can be scaled up to as large as your build plate can handle (this will also improve link strength) but I wouldn't scale down as this will make the links more fragile and might not leave enough space for movement.

This model requires 1 AMS and has a lot of filament changes so I ran a purge optimization to minimize the purge amounts for the standard brown and green color schemes. As always, if you want multiple, it's more efficient to print them on a single plate.

Filament Warning:

This model has a lot of small surfaces in contact with the build plate making it vulnerable to bed adhesion failures. It took me a lot of troubleshooting to figure out what was going wrong and I wanted to save you the hassle if you encounter issues with this print.

1. Clean your build plate well with dish soap and avoid touching the center
2. Make sure your hot bed is 60-65 degrees
3. Dry your filament and use good-quality filament
4. Keep all print speeds below 50 mm/s (default for my print profiles)

This print profile does work, I've had multiple successful prints, but if the conditions above are not met this model is susceptible to bed adhesion issues