Hi all!

I know it's weird, but I've been having these dreams for some time now in which I had a BIG friend cube! (well, a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm version of it).

But just sizing up the original isn't much of a challenge So I thought it would be fun to have it as a "do-it-yourself" building kit, a) for testing my design skills, b) having the fun of assembling something cool and c) for having Shapeways not loosing ~700+ cm2 of material that would otherwise get trapped inside.

I've designed the faces of the cube to be plates with little pins on them and small triangles with little notches in them that go on the inside. The notches and pins are square so they should make a nice square fit. Don't worry, I've kept some clearance in mind, so they'll fit together. They should also give the whole structure some more rigidity while not waisting much space inside, so when assembled (leaving 1 plate unglued) you'd end up with a cool box to put something in

Some worries:
1) I've maybe made the triangles a bit too small to give enough rigidity? (they are 20mm).
2) The triangles being the exact size to fit inside the inner corners of the cube. I was thinking there too needs to be a slight clearance (like ~0,1/0,2mm) to make sure they fit. But it makes me doubt if that's true.. because, for example, if you have 1 plate with a triangle on it, the fitting from the pins should position it in the exact corner.

So the entire kit should consist of 6 plates and 8 triangles

The plates:


The triangles:


The fitting on the inside:


I'm not sure how to 'offer' this kit, a) a complete set with all 6 plates and 8 triangles or b) as separate parts, so you'd have to order 6 plates and 8 triangles. Option a would be most practical for the end user and option b would be a better 'way' to make money for me, as I can put markup on the individual parts. But I think option b will cause extra costs as for every part you'd have to pay the initial 'start-up' fee.

My preference goes to option a as I'm not intending to squeeze every penny out of a buyer and make more money that way, but I want to have a product that gives the buyer a complete package.

Any thoughts, tips, concerns etc. would be much appreciated!

[Updated on: Mon, 31 January 2011 16:56 UTC]

I've spaced them about 10mm apart, so I could change that to 3mm or something.. hopefully that'll also fix the file upload, so all pieces are in the model. At the moment I've placed them like this:

But the render in my shop only shows the corner pieces

I'll make a better preview picture tomorrow, the default renders aren't usually the best representation of a product...

Thanks for the input!

[Updated on: Tue, 01 February 2011 00:48 UTC]

I've made 2 stacks of 3 with the plates and 2 square groups of 4 with the corner pieces

I usually export to .dae from Sketchup and open that with Meshlab.. but in Meshlab, I have no clue what so ever what to do with it I just open it and save it as .stl and that usually works just fine



*edit*
hm.. uploaded it this way but it still only shows the corner pieces

[Updated on: Tue, 01 February 2011 10:29 UTC]