Tessellator Tray! (Patreon)

Hey there, wonderful people!

3D printing never ceases to get me enthused.  There really is an endless sea of possibilities out there to explore.  This started off with thoughts of chainmail.  Well, kind of.  Lets call it linked, repeating parts.  NASA did some awesome chainmail-ish stuff a while back, and I started with that in the back of my mind, designing a fairly convoluted linkage structure that sat on the back of an array of squares.  

I printed my experiment, and immediately found that while my links gave lots of freedom to move, the squares tiles themselves butted up against each other very quickly.  And that inspired what became this model!  What if we had parts that were free to move, but which under force (such as gravity) ended up in a particular shape?  Soon, the actual chainmail part was gone entirely, replaced by much simpler conic hinges.  When the form is reoriented and pushed from another direction it moves and flexes, but under load it resumes its nice curved position.

An earlier version of this was square, but a quick test had me sold on the idea of a hexagonal version instead, and here we are! 

Here's a nice close-up view of the tessellation pattern that makes up the model.  Basically, the three outermost points of the repeating shape hinge into the three innermost ones, which gives both the ability to rotate and a degree of looseness in the coupling between the parts.

File Location

You'll fine this one on dropbox under 820 Tessellator Tray, and it's just a single STL file.

Printing Tips

The Tessellator Tray prints upside-down, like this:

Now, while it's designed for straightforward, support-free printing you'll want to make sure that your first layer is nice and neat, because a) it's going to be the top surface of the model, and b) there are a bunch of individual parts that need to stay stuck down during the print!

As with any articulated model, you'll want to watch out that things like stringing don't bind together parts that are supposed to move :)

Final Thoughts

I love the flexibility of this surface!  It would be neat to incorporate something similar into other things.  It echoes the articulated parts of such things as the Slideback Box but it's really a different thing entirely, and I like it :D

I hope you do too!

xoxo

Sven.

PS: If you shake this thing it rattles in an appealing/annoying way that may or may not be a bonus!