Ball in a Knot & Just the Knot

thingiverse

This design is a simple knot carved out with room for a ball to roll around inside. I've also included the solid knot that I used to make sure the printing would be okay. I started by creating the knot as a spline in Cheetah3D and then importing it into ZBrush. In ZBrush, I tried a variety of ways to look inside and settled on a simple groove almost the entire way around the knot. Finally I added one ball to complete the design. If there is interest in versions with additional balls, just let me know. UPDATE: Because of a request by Dogbert, I've uploaded a version of the Ball in a Knot without the ball. Instructions I used ReplicatorG to prepare the file, a MakerBot Replicator2 with the Replicator 2 slicing defaults and the following settings with white MakerBot PLA to do the printing: Infill = 10% Layer Height = 0.200 Shells = 1 Feedrate = 40 Travel Feed = 55 Temperature = 220 I used a raft with full support. It took 7 hours to print the Ball in a Knot (100 mm tall) and less than 2 hours to print the solid knot (50 mm tall). Removing the support structure wasn't as difficult as some of my other things, but be patient nevertheless.