Almost February Already!

Happy end-of-January, my favourite people!

Not only is it no longer 2020, but it's almost not even January 2021 anymore.  How time flies!  If there's one thing that's been a constant for me in January, it's... having Dice-O-Matic Geared Dice Roller prototypes printing :P  

(I'm assuming you've already read the other two posts that just went up :P)

So many times I thought "okay, this one will be the final version, I've covered everything!" only to test things and find that a four-sided die could wedge itself into some little crevice, or a twelve-sider could balance on a little flat slab I'd thought was inaccessible.  It did give me opportunities to keep trying different handle styles, though, and to tweak the overall width of the machine.  And it worked out in the end, as you've hopefully seen in the other post by now :P

I'm often hesitant when putting together big models like that, but this one was fundamentally intended to be big, over-the-top, and ridiculous.  A ~2 day print time on an Ender 3 test machine did mean that iterating through different versions took forever, though!  By the final version, though, there were improvements everywhere, from motion of the gears to the resilience of the model to adhesion issues.  

Also, I'm looking at a bunch of empty spools on the bench, here, and it really does underscore that I couldn't possibly do this stuff without your amazing support 💗

What else did I work on that hasn't yet been published?  I did experiment with a few other things, including a foray into a chess set.  I'm not sure exactly where it's going to go, but you probably get the idea from the picture above that it's an excuse to assemble stuff and choose interesting colour schemes. I was poking fun at myself a bit, too, by starting with hexagons and threaded cog shapes :P  

What  I'm exploring there is the idea of an assembled board, which is almost certainly the most fun approach to things.  We'll see how it ends up!

Anyway, I hope your January was as fun and full of enthusiasm as mine! Happy almost-February!

xoxo

Sven.