Transposition Tank

Hi hi, wonderful people!

Well, look at this complicated bunch of gears and threads! It will not surprise you that I set out to make a mechanical design that was intentionally convoluted just for the sake of it! You see, I had a spool of filament that was just demanding such a design, and who am I to resist such a call?

I had the great pleasure of visiting Protopasta in the US, and boy are they a fun bunch of people! Alex at Protopasta is a filament magician and a very patient fellow. I rolled in with my bestie Courtney from Filament Stories and Alex watched as we piled the meeting room table with containers of arcane elements, glinting and gleaming.

Something caught my eye - a gold base that wasn't super smooth, but also wasn't coarse, and it had a kind of industrial character to it that I just immediately loved. I waved my arms around enthusiastically and tried to convey desert hues with reds and oranges, rich but not too bright, with shifting variations. I have no idea how Alex managed to work out what I was talking about, but he knew exactly what we needed, and soon we were at the extrusion line, manually dropping tiny bits of colour into the process at just the right moment to get just the right kind of colour changes. I did mention that Alex is a filament magician!

And wow, it's a magical thing to see it all appearing at the other end on the spool! "Desert sunset!" exclaimed Alex! But it immediately made me think of industrial rust, too...

And so that's how we got here to the Transposition Tank! I wanted something with lots of detail and complication! But I also wanted to try something I hadn't done before, and in this case it's the combination of a screw thread mechanism and planetary gearing.

There are two main considerations here. Firstly, the screw thread and the gearing have to coexist without getting in each others' way, which is easier said than done since they also have to move past each other as the lid is placed into the container body. Secondly, the screw thread needs to pull the gears into a locking position so that things end up nice and secure.

I've printed this one in two filaments to make it clearer what's going on, but I have to admit it's fun to print it in a single colour just to make it less obvious, especially since that was kind of the point of the whole design in the first place! Still, it's nice seeing things move, and multicolour does give a nice contrast for that. (Note that I haven't made separate multimaterial files - it's simple to just paint the bodies in the slicer, since they're entirely separate from each other)

Print Description

This is an articulated print, so make sure your bottom layer is nice and neat and that there aren't any print issues like stringing or overextrusion that might bind moving parts together.

Print Dimensions

There are actually two different sizes of container for this one!

The container main body occupies 131mm x 131mm on the print bed. The low volume version is 84mm tall, while the high volume version reaches a height of 144mm.

Supports Needed?

Not at all!  Designed for straightforward printing!

Scalability

Hmm, good question! The tolerances are reasonably generous, so you could probably scale this down a little - in fact, I printed it at 70% while testing and beyond having to ease some sticky gears into motion it was just fine.

Scaling up will have the usual caveats about the cogs getting looser, but the thread mechanism is reasonably coarse, and should keep things reasonably functional as the scale increases.

Print Orientation

The container and lid both print right-way up!

Further Thoughts

I chatted a lot to Alex as we worked, and it is remarkable how much creative exploration goes into developing interesting filaments, and how relatable his enthusiastic creative process was!

Thank you so much Alex, and all the other awesome people at Protopasta, for just being great and inspiring! Thank you Courtney for actually making all this happen!

And thank you all for being such amazing supporters, and making it possible for me to do all this crazy stuff ♥

As always, happy printing!

xoxo

Sven.

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544 Transposition Tank