Thing-O-Matic Constructions

George W. Hart

This page collects some models I have made with the Makerbot Thing-O-Matic.   Feel free to build, repost, and modify these stl files in any way you like, but please include a link to this page as your source. You may also want to see my page of things I made on my Makerbot.  For more complex models that I have made on other 3D printing machines, see my Rapid Prototyping page.



After assembling it, I tested it with various models that I had already made on the Cupcake, for comparison.  It took some time to get it tuned up, but since then I've been printing quite a few things.  The first new thing I made was this compound of three cubes.  This shape adorns the left-hand tower of Escher's Waterfall:



Then I made this stellated rhombic dodecahedron, which adorns the right-hand tower:



The stl files for these models are here: compound of three cubes, stellated rhombic dodecahedron.  A cool thing about the stellated rhombic dodecahedron is that it is a space-packing shape.  If you make enough copies, you can fill all space without any gaps or overlaps---just like with bricks, but this shape is more surprising.  Here you can see a bit of the packing:




Here's another cool thing, a puzzle made of four interlinked triangles.  It is quite tricky to put together.



The stl file for six sticks is here. You have to build it twice to get all twelve pieces.




Here's a not-so-great build of one of my hypothetical sand dollar designs.



It was supposed to look like the image above, but the tiny details at the edges are hard to reproduce.
Here's the stl file. I made the bottom flat so no support structure is needed.




This is an awesome folding dodecahedron and its complement. Together they form a cube. Each is made of eight parts hinged together with white adhesive tape.  To get a sense of it, see the video Inside-Out Logic on my YouTube channel.  The stl files are here and here.  You need to make four copies of each file and also four copies of the mirror image of each file.  From the video, you can figure out how they get assembled.

(more to come as I get time...)