Serpentine Celtic Knot Drop Spindle Whorl

thingiverse

~12g whorl, 2.75" diameter with notch and dowel insert. This is light enough to spin extremely fine fiber by hand, as seen in the last photo with 21 micron merino wool. Print Settings Printer: Maker Select 3D Printer v2 Rafts: Yes Supports: Yes Infill: 15% Notes: Printed weight is only about 13 grams including braces, raft and supports--extremely light, perfect for spinning lace and cobweb weight yarn. gcode prints vertically on a small raft with built-in braces that easily break away by hand, and supports through the dowel rod hole that are easily chipped out. Post-Printing Tools Required 1 hook Power drill with bit correctly sized for hook 1 dowel rod, .31" in diameter The cone sticking out of the center is where your hook will go. I've cut that off my finished product, drilled down into the dowel from the top of the whorl, and then hand-screwed in the hook. No glue required! How I Designed This This design was inspired by one found in the Book of Kells and only slightly redesigned for this purpose. Re-illustrated in the book Celtic Art - The Methods of Construction by George Bain, this is Plate 6 of Page 111. I scanned this image and ran it through Adobe Illustrator and laid out the patterns how I wanted them for the whorl top, traced in SketchUp and built the body. When I checked in my slicer, it was going to weigh somewhere around 38 grams, so I imported it into TinkerCAD (after first converting to STL in Blender from OBJ, cause I still haven't figured out how to design anything in Blender) and cut out tubes from the bottom, which helped significantly. I began test printing it vertically because the time was reduced to about half of what it would have been lying flat, and the bottom of the round was chunky, so we stopped it and I built in the curved braces here. It worked great.