ChainMail

thingiverse

This is not what you think it is. What it is is a fiendishly difficult 3D puzzle. If you are able to solve it please leave a comment and photo here. I don't expect to see many of those. Here is the story behind this print: Several months ago I saw a posting from someone who wanted to 3D print some chainmail. If you don't know what chainmail is, look here: https://www.medievalcollectibles.com/product-category/armour/chainmail-armour/. The fact that medieval craftsman were able to make chainmail is mind boggling itself, given the crude hand tools they had to work with. But we are more fortunate - we have fancy machines that can easily make the interlocking links that form chainmail. Since chainmail does require an interesting 3D solution I thought I'd try to make a simple design of interlocking links that can be 3D printed. Chainmail.stl is the result; it is 8 links of what could be an arbitrarily large array. The first photo shows the links right after printing. Notice that they are all nicely arranged and only one layer thick. The second layer shows how they look after removal from the print bed and cleaned up a bit. This was the point at which I discovered what these 8 links really are. I thought it would be easy to rearrange them into the flat configuration they had on my printer. But noooo! I quickly discovered that reaching the original arrangement was virtually impossible - at least for me. Maybe you can do better. Maybe not. These links printed in 32 minutes using a layer height of 2.03 mm and print speed of 110 mm/sec. If you decide to print them you might make things a bit easier for yourself by scaling the links up in size by maybe 150% or so. My printer required no supports (I really don't like supports) so you could say this print is also a bridge test. Good luck to you.