A Rogues Gallery! Rejects and Experiments! (Patreon)

Ideas never just happen out of nowhere.  All those little steps we take to try something out, experiment, see what happens, they all lodge themselves into our brains.  Whether it's something purely technical or an entirely aesthetic endeavour, each thing  we do lets us reach a bit further next time.  Brains are great at taking what we've done before and abstracting it away so that we can concentrate on bigger challenges.  Yay, brains!  
I do a lot of this kind of experimenting.  Sometimes it leads to a more fully-formed idea.  Other times, not so much.  Here are some examples of both!
Right, so, all those silver-grey things above.  Let's start with the bottom right.  Those are miter cogs that printed flat and were hinged to mesh in with each other in a square.  Except, I screwed up the actual cog rotations, so while they hinge nicely into each other, those cogs will never, ever turn!  Oops. Still, I like the idea, and maybe it'll resurface as part of something more elaborate...
Now, the meshed cogs.  Just an experiment to see if I could print the cogs so close together, and fixed in place.  It worked just fine! You can even run paper between the cogs if you want to ruin some perfectly good paper.  You know, I might pop this one on dropbox in case anyone's interested. Okay, done! It has the snappy name "two meshed cogs" :)
The last thing in that image is a cancelled print that has actually already evolved into a more workable form... I'll say nothing more except test printing is under way!  It'll be posted early in the new year, and will be exclusive here to you, my wonderful supporters :)

What do these boxes have in common?  They all have swivel lids.  If you saw that swivel experiment I put on instagram with the three spinning parts, that's what we're looking at here.  It's a really fun approach, but I'm not happy with the robustness.  Basically, the lid is a big lever that very easily puts too much force on the swivel, which isn't a great thing.  So, I need to give some thought to how to mitigate that, design-wise.
That said, I've just put that top left one on Dropbox anyway! It's overly-grandly titled "Enceladus Pivot Box". You can always tell how close I've come to releasing something by whether it's been given an interesting name, rather than still going by something like "Pivot Box 4" 😁
Oh, and because someone asked for it, I've put that swivel experiment up, too - it's listed as "Swivel Test"

Hey look, it's an early version of that swipe flask I posted the other day!  This version was way, way too big, but it still moved very smoothly.  I killed the print early, because I'd already worked out a few improvements and there was no point burning more filament.
Speaking of designs that ran through filament...

Yep, there were some amusing failures on that one... I mean, look at those bits, how was that ever going to work...

Well, what a year 2019 (let alone 2109) has been! Thank you all so much for your support, enthusiasm and passion! I'm seeing in the new year from somewhere camped on a mountain, so please forgive delays in responding to messages and comments - I look forward very much to catching up on things when I'm back in civilization.

Happy and safe new year, everyone! ❤️