Skull Tessellation Box

Hi, wonderful people!

I do love a good tessellation! Here we have a set of expressive skull boxes that neatly fit into each other to efficiently tile two-dimensional space!

It won't surprise you to know that the vast majority of the time on this project went into working out how to shape a stylised skull form so that it would tile a plane, and then tweaking it so that it had the right kind of feel for what I was trying to do! Naturally, the geometry is effectively a hexagon, since those are the bestagons. A hexagon with a great deal of stylistic modification, though, to the point where it's really only obvious when you look at the number of adjacent neighbours the tiles have when tessellated.

Being three-dimensional forms, though, these tiles deserved some interestingness to its depth as well. So, you'll notice that the upper cranial bits curve outwards, while the lower jaw parts curve inwards, and all those parts fit neatly against each other when tiled.

Optional Magnets (6mm x 3mm cylindrical magnets as usual!)

Ah, magnets! This is much more fun with magnets involved.

Each box will need 6 magnets for the box body

If you're using magnets in the lid, you probably don't need more than two. I just used top and bottom, though the model provides places for all six spots.

Originally, the magnets were pushed in from inside the model, rather than being exposed on the outside. However, that effectively made the magnets at least two layers of printing apart, which significantly weakened their hold on each other, so now the base box magnets are added from the outside instead. So, what orientation should they be?

IMPORTANT: Magnet orientation!

In the main box... If you're using magnets in the base box to hold the tiles together you'll need six of them per box. Three of the magnets need to be oriented one way, and the other three must be the opposite polarity. Fortunately, the model has the magnet holes marked appropriately! The upper three magnet holes have a star shape that's raised from the surface. The lower three magnet holes have a sunken star shape instead. The raised and sunken shapes will fit nicely into each other, and the opposed magnets will hold them there.

 In the lid... I'm not sure you really need six magnets in the lid! I used two. For each magnet, check the orientation of the corresponding main box magnet.

Print Description

There's nothing overly tricky here! All regular mode prints, nothing crazy in this one :)

Note that the backing panel that pushes into the lid to give background colour to the eyes and nose is a press-fit piece. As such, there are three different versions provided:

• No clearance specified between insert and lid border
• 0.1mm clearance
• 0.2mm clearance

If in doubt, just print the 0.2mm version. If it's too loose it can still be glued in, after all. And, of course, you can scale the insert if you really want to fine-tune the fit!

Print Dimensions

The main box body occupies 90mm x 91mm on the print bed and is 31mm tall.

Supports Needed?

Not at all!  Designed for straightforward printing!

Scalability

This will probably scale reasonably well, but of course the magnets will no longer fit!

Print Orientation

The main box body prints right-way up. The skull lid prints face-down. The insert that pushes into the lid prints with the raised edge side up.

Further Thoughts

I wonder if it would be possible to do something similar with faces on a polyhedron of some kind? That would be pretty cool, tessellating skulls that form a ball! You couldn't just use this existing skull design, of course, since there aren't any polyhedra with purely hexagonal faces, but if you worked with a polyhedron formed from hexagons-and-something-else, then perhaps there'd be a solution...

Happy printing!

xoxo

Sven.

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486 Skull Tessellation Box