Quieter twisting fidget pass through cones

December 2024

A friend showed me a twisty cone that she liked the look of. https://www.printables.com/model/927393-spiral-cone-fidget-toy The original is too loud for my taste, so I started from scratch in Fusion and found that mesh quality and slicing choices seem to be more important than the geometry of the model in knocking out the loud shriek.

Setting the layer heights of the two halves to be a common multiple of different large primes seems to knock out the high frequencies in the crunch as they slide past each other. They can be printed hollow without shrieking unpleasantly.

I used 0.227mm for the tentacles, and 0.137 for the core.  

I include a 3mf file with suitable settings containing objects I built. The meshes are high resolution to stop the vertices of the model dominating the noise. 

I imagine prime layer heights could help with any of the various twisty things out there that have smooth enough meshes. A coarse mesh will dictate the noise if you try to slice it more finely that the triangles in the model.