Thursday, July 21, 2011

Flexible Burr...Cuburr?

Here's a picture of the current revision of my flexible burr puzzle. I've adopted a scheme with a distinct color for each type of part.


Assembling the parts depends heavily on the flexibility of the material, as the parts must be distorted to fit through each other.


It looks like a mess, but the puzzle is almost solved.


The last step is to fold the faces flat and hook the corners together so it holds a cube shape.


I carved the puzzle's name "Cuburr" into one of the faces in the 3D data, which caused the SD300 to trace it like line art.


That last trick exploits a limitation of the SD300's build process: in the STL data the letters were rendered as cutouts in flat wall, narrower than 1 mm. The SD300's XY plotter can cut with 0.1mm precision, but regions narrower than 1 mm are left bonded to the layer beneath; you have to pry them mechanically if you want them removed. For situations like this, it's a convenient way to emboss line art onto a flat surface.

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