This week’s selection is the Geared Christmas Tree Spiral by Cults contributor ENJOYREVIT.
Today is Christmas Day, and many readers will be busy under their tree opening presents. Hopefully, one of them will be a new desktop 3D printer.
Those new 3D printers will no doubt be fired up later today, and they will certainly need a good 3D model to print on them. That’s what this week’s selection is all about.
It’s a holiday-themed design with a twist. Literally, a twist: you twirl the bottom of the tree and a gearing mechanism spreads the flat tree into a beautiful spiral. It’s a magnificent design.
ENJOYREVIT, an “architect who loves 3D Design & Modeling”, explains how it works:
”There are gears inside the baseplate to make it easier to spread the tree. The gears inside are designed to accelerate 5x, so you can create a perfect spiral tree in a single rotation. All the bumps on each of the branches in the previous version are redesigned to make them more precise.”
As you might suspect, there are several parts to print in order to assemble this item, all without support structures. There are a series of gears to be placed in the bottom portion, but the key element is the tree itself.
It’s an articulated component that’s printed in place in one job, as shown here. Note that it is recommended to print with a couple of layer changes to give the edges of the tree branches a different color. That’s something that can be done on any desktop 3D printer; you don’t require multimaterial capability.
That’s it, there are no motors or wires required, just a pile of 3D printed parts that appear to be easily produced.
This is an ideal model for breaking in that shiny new 3D printer you just received. It’s available on Cults for download at the low cost of about US$3.
Via Cults
