Extraplanetary Geared Stand

Hey there, wonderful people!

Planetary gears are just the best! As a fan of making things overly complicated, it's hard to find a mechanism that looks more cool and mechanical than that. And the Planetary Phone Stand was always a favourite design, but it certainly has limitations. Most obviously, in the years since that was designed, phones have become much, much larger! But there are other things that could bear improvement, too, like the adjustment bolt that was a bit fiddly and breakable, and the fact that there were a limited number of adjustment positions.

And so we now have the Extraplanetary Geared Stand! It's bigger and works quite differently!

Most obviously, the adjustment mechanism no longer uses bolts, and instead uses a sprung paddle at the back which can be pressed to allow the angle to be adjusted. If you've read the writeup on the Springlatch Box you'll see the inspiration here. The paddle is attached to a sprung pin that engages with the outer ring of the planetary gear system. And as with the Springlatch Box, the spring is loaded only during adjustment, and is at rest when the position is locked. That bit about engaging with the outer ring is important, too - the previous model had the position adjuster in the centre instead. By shifting the moving parts to the outside it's possible to have a far more granular adjustment!

It also prints ready to go, without needing the folding of the Planetary Phone Stand.

Print Description

The Extraplanetary Geared Stand is an articulated model, so make sure your first layer is nice and neat, and watch out for print quality issues like overextrusion or stringing that might bond moving parts together.

Print Dimensions

The Extraplanetary Geared Stand occupies 146mm x 180mm on the print bed and is 85mm tall.

Supports Needed?

Not at all!  Designed for straightforward printing!

Scalability

I've printed this one at 65% scale and it came out very nicely! It should likely scale up quite well, too. Interestingly, 65% scale yields roughly the size of the old Planetary Phone Stand! See the attached photo for size comparisons!

Print Orientation

Orientation for printing is side-down so that all the cogs are flat against the print bed.

Further Thoughts

It's interesting to look back on the things that didn't work in a model, and the one that stands out for me with this is that the original plan was to have a much tighter fit between the latching pin and the slots in the ring gear (except for the very first slot, which needed to maintain clearance for printability). The idea was that this could remove even the slight rotational movement that the pin otherwise allows due to clearances between the pin and slot. However, all that actually did was move the ring itself, which has its own clearances for movement, and didn't make any actual useful change at all.

What it did do, though was to add another potential issue if the very tight fit was too close for a given printer, so that whole thing got reverted :) But still, exploring these ideas is vital for finding the ones that do work!

Happy printing!

xoxo

Sven.

---

478 Extraplanetary Geared Stand