3D Printed Spiral Box Desktop Toy - Using Fusion 360

This is an interesting exercise in creating a 3 dimensional spiral object from straight elements.

It doesn't have a use but looks nice sitting on the desk!

It could be scaled up or down from the dimensions I have given prior to 3D printing.

You could also try using a different shape, triangle or pentagon?

See some of my other work here:

https://chrisweedonart.wixsite.com/home

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/ChrisWeedonArt

https://folksy.com/shops/chrisweedon

The idea is to create the shape from a series of thin squares laid on top of each other, each subsequent element is slightly smaller, rotated slightly and touches the sides of the previous element. This is repeated for 25 layers for the 26th layer and last element I have added a cylinder. The whole is encased in a larger cube and then the two bodies combined with the stepped body cut away from the cube.

Start with a new design.

Start a Sketch using the XY plane, create a rectangle using centre and point, with the centre on the origin (0,0) and a size of 50mm.

Use Extrude and give it a height of 2mm.

Start another Sketch and select the top surface of the previously extruded body as the plane to work on. Select Construct in the Sketch Palette menu. Start a line from one corner of the top surface with a length of 2mm select a point along one side of the top face. Repeat this a further 2 times on separate sides. See images. This will create three points from where the next surface will be created.

Uncheck Construct in the Sketch Palette menu.

Create a rectangle with 3 points, select the 3 points you constructed, extrude this rectangle to a height of 2mm and select Join in the menu so the the two elements will become one body.

Repeat these steps until you have 25 layers in total.

I added a cylinder of 6mm diameter and 2mm high at the centre of the last rectangular surface. This will create a hole in the top, join this the the main body.

Add a cube 52 x 52 x 52mm set on the XY plane centred at the origin (0,0), this should be a separate body.

Finally combine the two bodies using the cube as the Target Body and the spiral stepped body as the Tooled Body and the operation set as Cut, this will remove it from the cube.

Export the completed project as an STL file.

Load this into you preferred slicer, rotate it 180 degrees so that the surface with the hole is on the bed.

I printed with 0.2mm layers, 20% infill and no support.

With my printer (Ender 3) and settings it takes about 5.5 hours and uses 46g of PLA

Enjoy