Mechanical Easter Egg!

Happy almost-Easter, wonderful people!

I had a bunch of requests about a mechanical easter egg in a similar style to the Mechanical Valentine, and it's finally ready to roll! (pun slightly intended, har har har).

The Mechanical Easter Egg started out as an egg with a hinged top, rather than a hinged side, but that meant much steeper curves on the lid and the gears had to be on significant angles, which did not bode well for printability.  Eventually, though, the whole idea transformed into an egg with a hinged side.  

The plan was to maximise interior volume, which basically meant minimising the size of the door, since the door itself would be full of moving parts and would not be contributing to available interior space.  So, the egg shape was sliced such that the lower edge of the body, when placed on the printer bed, would have a tangent at 45 degrees, placing the door as far out as possible before causing printability concerns.  Of course, there are other elements in the design (like the door frame) for improving printability, but that's the fundamental one that makes it all work.  With that bit sorted, there was s general shuffling around of threads and latches and gears until things fit nicely.

Now, there's one aspect of this design that makes it very much like the Mechanical Valentine - the gears aren't actually involved in the latching.  There's a screw thread hidden below the main cog (with bunny handle), and turning the cog drives that thread around to engage with the body latch.  The fact that it also turns the smaller cogs is just to make it look cool.  That said, you can technically turn the small gears to open and close the latch, but you'll probably need pliers to get enough force into it :P

For reference it's approximately this big :P

Print Description

This is an articulated model, so make sure your first layer is nice and neat, and that there aren't any print issues like stringing or overextrusion that might bind moving parts together!

There are some shallow curves on the upper parts of the egg, since, well, it's egg-shaped, and you might want to use small or variable layer heights to get that as neat as possible.

Print Dimensions

The Mechanical Easter Egg occupies 124mm x 159mm on the print bed and is 73mm tall.

Supports Needed?

Not at all!  Designed for straightforward printing!

Scalability

As an articulated model this isn't designed for scaling, but the tolerances are generous and should allow scaling up or down a bit without too much trouble.  The thread closure has the advantage of being able to take up the inevitable slack of scaling up!

Print Orientation

The Mechanical Easter Egg prints open, like so:

File Location

You'll find this one at at 590 Mechanical Easter Egg

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

On the Subject of Easter Models...

In case you want more Easter-y things...

A blast from the past on the Easter theme is the Swirly-Whirly vase mode egg, which is a definite favourite of mine! 

https://www.patreon.com/posts/swirly-whirly-49274717 

Happy Almost-Easter!

xoxo

Sven.