Today we printed a redesign of AuntDaisy's Geo Hart 72 Pencil Holder from Thingiverse. Instead of scaling that model we made two simple new models in Tinkercad. Each model is just a hexagon ring with holes in it, used to line up pencils to make George Hart's wonderful 72 Pencils sculpture. Here's what our 72 pencils looked like right before we removed the last two rings and a stray rubber band that was keeping in the front pencil:
And here's what the rings themselves look like. The blue rings are sized to fit snugly around the erasers of standard yellow Triconderoga pencils, and the red rings have large holes that are sized to fit around the body of the pencils at the pointy ends. I didn't need all eight of these; two of each were enough to keep half of the pencils in place so that I could line things up and slide in the other 36.
Tinkercad link: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/aTD0Zg8rDSj-pencil-sculpture-helpers
Thingiverse link: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:440151
Technical notes, failure flavor: The sculpture seemed so, so sturdy that we somehow thought it would all stay together even after we removed the last helper rings. We saw online that other people use crazy glue to hold together parts of the model but that is OTHER PEOPLE. We thought we were soooo much better and would never have to do such a thing. Surely WE can do this without glue, everything is going so well, what could happen?
The pencils are now assembled into a much simpler sculpture that we proudly display in our lovely home:
