Steampunk Strawberry

Howdy, wonderful people!

It's funny how designs evolve.  I desperately wanted to do something with a kind of plate-style texture, and so started making some interesting shapes and seeing how I could break it up with flat planes.  But, I didn't really get anywhere useful, so I put it aside, and worked on something else.  

That something-else was a nice smooth strawberry.  Quite the opposite, style-wise, all curved and organic.  You can see where this is going, right?  At some point it occurred to me that combining those two ideas might be fun, and soon enough I had a strange little strawberry container made up of riveted-style plates.  I added some more rivets in the centres of the plates to make things more strawberryish!

What took the longest, though, was deciding on the closure mechanism - it went through at least two different geared approaches and  three different threaded ones before it finally ended up in the satisfyingly-functional state it's in now.  I'll dig up a photo of the early test prints for the now-overdue end of month writeup! :)  

You'll notice that the strawberry is made up of several parts for the sake of having multi-colour happiness.  The leaves are held into a rotating part in the lid by a central bolt, but that bolt just keeps the leaves in place - it doesn't take any of the force of opening and closing things.

Just in case you don't want to use multiple colours, there's a full print-in-place version included, too, which essentially has the leaves and bolt fused into place.  Actually, that version came first, and was reverse engineered into parts...

Printing Tips

The usual line - this is an articulated model, so you'll want your bottom layer to be nice and neat, and you'll want to make sure you don't have any print issues like stringing or overextrusion that might bind moving parts together!  

The parts print in the following orientation:

Actually, the bolt will print just as well the other way up, and will probably balance better, but it's fun watching it print in that orientation :)

File Location

You'll find this on Dropbox under 771 Steampunk Strawberry

(Dropbox link post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/dropbox-and-are-31697592 )

Further Thoughts

The shape of this thing is just too much fun.  How did we ever live without the magic of being able to make these things into real, physical objects so easily?!

Happy printing!

xoxo

Sven.