Overly Complicated Bonbon!

Hey there, wonderful people!

It's that festive time of the year, and despite having no real intention to make specific models, here we are!  'Tis the season for unnecessarily complicated assemblies!

This started out as a much, much simpler screw-together tube-style bonbon, but I wanted to see if I could make it multicoloured in a way that would work with either assemblies or filament changes.  So, I played around with bits that slid over each other, but a combination of thin parts and printability issues made that all a bit problematic.  What I really wanted was to be able to change filaments and bring out a pattern.

So, that led to this!  The body of this bonbon prints flat and folds up into a hexagonal prism, which of course means that we can have flat patterns with different levels that work nicely with filament swaps.  Those stripes are 1mm apart in height, so just switching filaments between those levels will bring them out nicely.

What's more, it's an unnecessarily complicated model!  To put this together, you'll need to:

1) Fold the body panels around the two hexagonal inner plates - make sure you put both in at the same time!

2) Fill your bonbon before you go any further!

3) Place an end piece onto the bonbon, and tighten a bolt through it into the hexagonal plate.  Repeat for the other side.

Printing Tips

So, colour!  In my prints, here, I have lots of colour going on, but all I've actually done is swap the filament every two metres or so.  The stripes on the bonbon body are at different levels 1mm apart so if you change filament in between those steps it'll look all fancy and striped.

The parts print as shown in the picture below.  

The bolts print handle-down.

The ends print flat-side-down with the zigzag edge up.

The inner plates print flat-side-down, too.

The main body prints flat-side-down, and is hinged to fold together around the inner plates, so make sure there aren't any printing issues like stringing or overextrusion that might cause problems with binding moving parts together!  You know the drill :)

Print Dimensions

The main body is the largest part, and occupies 158mm x 156mm on the printer bed.  It's only 5mm tall, though.

File Locations

You'll find this one on dropbox under 710 Overly Complicated Bonbon

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

Further Thoughts

I should probably complete the simpler tube bonbon model I was working on, because that was far more usable than this one.  Much less interesting, though :)  

Just don't try to pull the ends off to open it - that's only going to work once! :D

xoxo

Sven.