Latest Creations: Iris box, locking triangle box, USB block, and articulated Butterfly

Wow! It was a busy weekend! Found some amazing new STL patterns to print, on my favourite site https://www.thingiverse.com

So let’s take a peek at what the new additions are!

Iris box : from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1817180

fully open

partially closed

closed!

What I love about this print is that it was a SINGLE PRINT. It was magical how it all came out.

Inspired by this Iris box, I wanted to find other cool-looking containers, and found this one, at Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:37217

closed, it just looks like an innocent box.

There are small locking ‘pins’ that roll into place.. the box only opens if you hold it in a certain angle!

really cool stuff!

And the next contestant from this weekend’s prints:

USB block – holds USB thumb drives, MicroSD cards, or SD cards.

The final thing I printed was for my mom (aww) – it’s a cute articulated (moving) butterfly!

the first printout turned out to be ‘spaghetti’

the second time printing, I laid some glue down on the print bed first, and it turned out great

Latest creations: Tulip, Labyrinth Trick tube

Upon a request from my friend Naren at work, I looked for a design for a tulip, and found one over at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3361696 which turned out to be trickier than I thought to print!

Whenever you are printing something that has a narrow body, then widens up at the top of the print, you have to print “with support”. This adds extra material that is removed when the print is complete. Unfortunately, for me, I’m not quite as nimble with my fingers as I wish I were.

When the print started, it looked like this:

As it printed, a protective sheath was printed around the stem, which was tricky to remove. The final product looks like this:

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Tricky Labyrinth box!

I saw this nifty STL file up on Thingiverse for a trick container. It’s a hexagonal tube with room to store stuff inside, but to open it you have to manipulate it and navigate through a ‘maze’ to unlock it.

The design is from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:201097

I traced the path from locked to unlocked status, and it looks like there’s 24 decision points where you have to turn it one way or another to get out.

So — how hard is it to solve? Well, I cheated and printed a miniature of the innards so that I would have a map to follow: