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We've completed our yearlong print-a-day project!
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Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Day 120 - "Ticket to Ride" trains tray

C's grandma gave us the game "Ticket to Ride" today, and it is great fun! The turns go by really quickly, making for a quick game that is fast-paced enough to hold everyone's attention even when it isn't their turn. However, each player has 45 trains to keep track of, which can get a bit messy. One of last year's Featured items on Thingiverse was a Ticket to Ride Locomotive Tray by princeofwands, which was updated and improved this year in HunterGreen's Ticket to Ride Rack design. However, both of those designs use a lot of plastic and take a long time to print. Today we designed a version in Tinkercad that uses far less material and prints in about half of the time, based loosely on the concept of our previous H-Tree Dish.


STL file: http://www.geekhaus.com/makerhome/day120_tickettoridetray.stl
Tinkercad link: https://tinkercad.com/things/cBtic9P91D4-day-120-ticket-to-ride-tray
Thingiverse link: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:213031

Settings: MakerWare .3mm/low in just under an hour, without a raft. I added large "Helper Disks" (see under the MakerWare File menu, in the Examples category) to the corners to keep the model from peeling up, and cut off the disks after printing. Even with that I had to shift the model to the left of my build plate, since things always print funny for me in the bottom right corner for some reason, no matter how much re-leveling I do.  Maybe it is time to consider a glass build plate...

Technical notes: Now that I'm learning to use OpenSCAD I am starting to feel that things like this are a real pain to make in Tinkercad, especially if a lot of tweaking and re-aligning is involved. It's a lot like the difference between using LaTeX or Microsoft Word; as a LaTeX junkie I am definitely feeling the current pulling me a little bit more towards OpenSCAD every day.

2 comments:

  1. Big fan, have been following your posts since the beginning. Don't hold back, go with OpenSCAD. For the longest time I avoided OpenSCAD (Blender was my tool of choice). Eventually I realized that if I can describe it in any way, OpenSCAD is the right tool every time. That LaTeX-Word analogy is exactly right!

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    1. Wow, Blender makes my brain hurt. But I think you're right about OpenSCAD being good for anything that you can describe - I guess sometimes I don't know what I am making or how to describe it until I start tinkering in Tinkercad. Need to get better at *tinkering* in OpenSCAD.

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