I suppose the title is a bit of misnomer. There was no actual exploding involved. What you see to the right are most of the interior parts from my retractable measuring tape. It had a spring that kept the little red button pushed out – but that disappeared as soon as I opened the plastic shell.
I’ve already said how much I appreciate Zaggo’s designs. Watching his treasure chest being built on my ‘bot was really really cool. The hinge pins were printed already inside of the hinge – something made possible by the nature of fused deposition modeling.
While this toy car by kparanya was probably the first captive breakaway multipart print I’ve seen on Thingiverse, I was more inspired by Zaggo’s treasure chest. :) It should be possible to print entire geared assemblies using this kind of system. Admittedly, you’re probably not going to get precision geared parts, but you could probably make a decent toy or rough tool. Once you start using the piece it should essentially grind out any extra plastic threads.
Anyhow, something to think about.
It’s hard to pick a favorite design from Zaggo. Some are fantastic upgrades – such as the Z axis crank. Some are functional – such as his whistle. But, his treasure chest is a special case. This design contains two parts which are printed simultaneously – with the hinged lid being printed with the pins inside the hinge. Just print, pop the lid off of its support pieces, and close the model.
One truly amazing thing about Zaggo’s models are his gcode files. A gcode file is created when you take the digital image file as an STL (which basically describes the exterior volumes of the model) and feed it into Skeinforge (which creates instructions for the printer to operate the extruder and move the 3 axes).
Although Skeinforge settings are typically considered to be unique to a ‘bot, everything I’ve ever printed using Zaggo’s gcodes has turned out perfectly.
