Week 5
Rings joint element and the final design
Last updated
Rings joint element and the final design
Last updated
By playing around with the ring chain elements, I realized that I could put the closed ring in each other to achieve a quite stable connection between the elements.
I created a design based on the ring chain elements with alternating filled and open rings. To increase the stability of the connection I placed the rings/laps closer to the frame. The laps (filled rings) are also a bit smaller than the rings. To make the laps more bendable I decided to set the width of this new design to 0.5mm instead of the previously used 0.7mm.
After printing, I was surprised at how well this new type of connection was working. I was able to connect my two test elements together using a lap and a ring of each element.
By cutting one of the elements into 3 pieces I was able to connect all of the pieces to the other element.
This was especially nice since it allowed me to potentially connect 6 elements to one and create a surface. Since there was not that much time left in the course and I needed to start mass printing, I choose this as the blueprint of my final design.
Since I stopped collaborating with Lucy, the hole in the middle of the element served no practical purpose anymore. I decided to fill up the space with a pattern resembling a snowflake. After trying several symmetrical shapes I came up with this design to fill the hole.
I also scaled up the element a bit to dimensions 98.78 * 88.49. Printing a square meter would require printing 115 pieces of this element.
In order to easily update the design of the pattern I also created a deconstructed version of the snowflake design.
For visualization purposes, I tried to create a square meter of elements in TinkerCad.
When having that many elements in one CAD file the software got super slow. It was also not possible to export a stl file.
