Stick Man with magnets

Try to beat your office mates or family members for the highest or the weirdest stick-man tower. After that, you can use the stick-men on your metallic whiteboard or your fridge

This easy to print series of stick-men are meant to be fitted out with 5x5 cylindrical or 5x5x5 cubic magnets. All should be printed with some TPE (e.g. Ninja Flex), but the 9mm ones also can be printed with a hard plastic like PLA.

• The 5mm ones are meant to be bendable
• The 9mm ones are stackable

• The 7mm one is in-between The OpenSCAD files should include the same code and allow customizing in any way you like, e.g. see the parent project for example and also take into consideration new parameters we added.

  You could order magnets from AliExpress.com. Search for "5x5mm neodymium magnet" or 5x5x5 ones. A pack of 100 cost less than 10 Euros/$ and it took 2 weeks to arrive in Switzerland.

  The reason why I did this is that I wanted to experiment with both TPE and magnets and learn about their physical constraints. Two lessons learned: (1) Bigger than 5mm Ninja flex sticks with 15% infill do not bend very easily. (2) Small strong magnets are not that strong...

  Print Settings

Printer:

Felix Pro1

Rafts:

Supports:

No

Resolution:

Infill:

15%

Notes:

• If using TPE, make the hole smaller, e.g. for a 5mm magnet use 4.4

• In addition, you can add a bottleneck on top of the hole (magnet*extra** parameters) and either keep the same length of the hole or make it longer (magnet in this case will be "inside") Ninjaflex doesn't glue well, so I really suggest to make the hole as small as possible. Use a stacked stick of magnets to force them in. In addition you can add glue, e.g. I tried Pritt extra strong (wait a few hours before use). Anyhow, reducing the hole size and adding a bottle neck is more efficient than using glue.

  You also can stick a magnet into the head and the heart. This allows for more funky constructions.

  TPEs like Ninja Flex should be printed slowly, e.g. 15mm/sec for first layer and 25mm/sec for all the rest. Using a bigger than 0.35 nozzle also would be a good idea (the sticks in the picture are made with a 0.35 one)

  Post-Printing

Finishing

I just burn off the excess strings ... but there may be more gentle ways.

To insert the magnets, take a stack of 8 or more magnets (you get more force like that and it will be more likely that you get the right direction)

Then you have to take a decision about the direction. For most stickman I printed, I always use the same direction, i.e. the hands of stickman A would stick to the feet of stickman B. Make sure to test the right direction before forcing the magnet into its hole ....

How I Designed This

Changes to the code.

I took the code from Daizyu and came up with 2-3 interesting configurations that required some change in the code. E.g. the 5mm version requires larger hands and feet in order to be able to stick magnets inside, the head hole is now a parameter and there is an extra hole for the heart.

Category: Construction Toys