Interlocking Designs

For this assignment, we created designs that integrated a interlocking mechanism.

I wanted to have a design that was minimalist but could be used to create larger complex structures. After looking a some geometric primitives, I saw the above hexagonal geometry and really liked its high degree of freedom for its larger number of interactions with other pieces and decided to use that as my basis.

In Grasshopper, I created a hexagon primitive that forms that main part of my piece.

As the assignment is to explore tight fitting locking mechanisms between pieces, I did not want to overcomplicate the interactive parts. I used a cylinder that stuck out of a three of the opposing sides while a hole was put in the other sides where other pieces could fit into. I then exported it to a stl to be sliced in Cura.

In Cura, I copied the piece eleven more times as to have more pieces to interact with. Being about 16 by 16 mm, a piece takes about 5 minutes to print. The print time for all of the pieces I had was about 30 minutes.

After printing it a few times and adjusting the width of the holes, I was able to create hexagonal pieces that were able to fit together to create panels or 3d shapes. The caveat is that there are inconsistencies in the tolerances of each hole, which leads to some of the connecting cylinders not being able to fit inside these holes. To fix this, I want to scale up the pieces to have a more consistent tolerance. Additionally, I am exploring a rod and hook mechanism for these pieces as I am using it for another print which is coming soon.

After the smaller models weren't fitting, I scaled them up so that the fits between pieces will have a higher tolerance. I printed out the bigger pieces and they seemed to fit together really well! There are some gaps between the pieces because I did not make the holes inside the hexagon models deep enough so the models aren't able to fit all the way in. It took about thirty minutes for the three new models to print which isn't too long of a tradeoff if I wanted to print additional models. They were able to create more complex structures which was the goal and I could imagine that with a few more models printed out more exciting structures could be built.