ERRF 2023! And some experimental models!

Woohoo, I'm going to ERRF!  That's the East Coast Reprap Festival in Maryland, USA, in September/October this year.  It's still half a year away but my flights from here in Australia are booked, and I'm super excited!

I will be sharing a booth with my good friends Filament Stories, Asylum Life, Fotis Mint, and Creatrix Britt.  It's going to be such a strange and wonderful thing to meet in person all all the people I've made friends with from a distance over the years!  

Anyway, if you're in the area, come and say hi! :)  More details to follow as the date get closer, I'm sure!

EXPERIMENTS FOLLOW!

Yes, that's right, the experiments folder is lurking away there on Dropbox, almost forgotten about, lurking in the darkness to lure the unwary.  

Neither of the models here are actually problematic from a printability perspective - more just explorations that don't have a good home but perhaps deserve to see the outside world...

Transmission Struts

The Transmission Struts are arrays of meshed cogs contained within frames so that rotating the cog at one end rotates the cog at the other.  There are a bunch of variations (with incomprehensible names) that have varying numbers and sizes of cogs.  

Remember that geared noisemaker a little while back?  That was based on the Transmission Struts!  

If nothing else, these do make fun fidget toys :)  The big square array is perhaps the most interesting, because the small amount of play between the cogs adds up over the array and it takes quite a bit of turning before the distant corner responds.

If you just want to see how they work in practice, the three-cog version is a good place to start!

Transmission Struts are located in the experiments folder on Dropbox:

999 ZZZ Experiments / Transmission Struts

Geotubes

I love making large assemblies, but this one didn't really go in the directions I originally intended, and I put it aside.  The plan was to make tube elements that could be screwed together in specific orientations, which is something that screw threads integrated into models don't really allow.

Each element has a thread at the top and a captive threaded collar at the base.  So, push the parts together using the dodecagonal orienting parts, and tighten the collar to fix things in place.

There are a couple of different body shapes, but they can be mixed together as they all connect in the same manner.  There are also base and lid parts to turn the tube into a convoluted storage unit, or just to neatly terminate the end.

Geotubes are located in the experiments folder on Dropbox:

999 ZZZ Experiments / Geotubes