Counterpoise Bowl (Patreon)

Hey there, wonderful people!

It's so satisfying to pull this one off the build plate and turn it upside down in a clattering of extending parts! The Counterpoise Bowl (or is it a basket?) is formed from a series of concentric rings that print accordioned-up together, unstacking to hang suspended just above the ground from three curved legs.

Now, it's worth noting that the Counterpoise Bowl isn't meant to fold up for convenience or anything like that - the legs are fixed in position, after all. There are two other drivers behind the way it works:

Firstly, printing with graduated colour filament means that the same colour shift will show up on every segment! It's not terribly obvious in the rather subdued filament in my photos here, though (especially with those coloured lights, haha!).  Likewise, if you swapped the filament mid-print and put a stripe through the middle you'd see that stripe repeated all the way down.

The main reason, though, is that I just really like that sense of tension, with easy part pulling against the next, and finally pulling against the legs holding everything up.  It's much the same kind of appeal as the tension in the Vertebranium Headphone Stand.


Print Description

This is a regular print, but since it's an articulated model you'll want to make sure your bottom layer is nice and neat, and that you don't have any print issues like overextrusion or stringing that might bond together moving parts!

Print Dimensions

The Counterpoise Bowl occupies 142mm x 147mm on the bed and is 179mm tall

Supports needed?

No supports required!

Infill?

There isn't a lot of infill in this model, but using a relatively generous level might serve to strengthen the legs, which are fundamentally the most vulnerable part of the print, since they're such long levers.

Scalability

This one isn't intended to be scaled, but the tolerances are all 0.5mm and you should be able to scale it down a little if you're careful about your print settings!

Print Orientation

The Counterpoise Bowl prints upside-down, like so:




File location

You'll find this one on Dropbox at 668 Counterpoise Bowl

Link to dropbox post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31697592

Further Thoughts

My kids had immediate questions about this one: could the parts twist and lock so that the legs are unnecessary?  Could the legs fold up?   All good points, and who knows, maybe the former part could appear in another model that explores this kind of thing!

I'd almost forgotten by the time I was typing this, but this model didn't actually start out with hexagons all over it - there were a multitude of tiny holes, kind of like the texture on the Catalyst Cube.  It looked cool!  However, this is a model with a great deal of perimeter printing, and those tiny holes were slow!  So instead it shifted to hexagons with shallow angles to let the printer get a little speed up between direction changes, and print time halved.  And hey, hexagons are cooler anyway :P

Happy printing!

xoxo

Sven.