clockspring3D

Oblique Sliced Egg (Patreon)

Published:

2023-04-02 08:02:44

Imported:

2023-10

Content

Happy almost-Easter, wonderful people!

This design came about because I was agonising over mechanical egg concepts, and decided to do something else - an assembled egg! This is a set of slices that assemble into a vaguely-egg-shaped thing, and are then held together with a threaded ring over the top.

While the threaded ring does hold things together, the parts are engaged with each other such that they will sit quite happily without it (until you try to pick it up by one of the middle pieces, of course. Each slice is topped with an interior ring that the next slides onto, and an orienting feature makes sure that the round-ish parts can't accidentally rotate, which would mess up the thread continuity.

Print Description

This one should be fairly resilient to print issues, being an assembly rather than an articulated model like the Mechanical Easter Egg that's also just posted. So, even if the prints aren't precisely dimensionally correct there'll be a lot of latitude to get them connected, and the threaded ring will tolerate a fair bit of variance and take up the slack if necessary.

Print Dimensions

Let's pick slice #2 as a representative piece! It occupies 76mm x 82mm on the print bed, and is 23mm tall.

Supports Needed?

Not at all! Designed for straightforward printing!

Scalability

This one should scale up or down to some extent reasonably well, though the fit between pieces will obviously change! At some point scaling down will cause the segments to be too tight to fit together, and in scaling up there'll be a point where the threaded ring will need to be scaled slightly less-large so that it still engages the egg pieces.

Print Orientation

The outer ring prints upside-down, the bottom slice prints right-way-up, and the remaining bits print on their lower flat face, like so: