Gear Table toy for kids

This is a toy that I designed/made for my 2yo son for Christmas this year.  It is a plate with a grid of 5x5 pins that accept a common spur gear that will mesh when placed in some or all of the positions.  The pins and holes are sized for a free running fit, with a nominal 0.007" oversize for the 0.5" hole, when printed with PLA.

This was made with my Bambu X1C, printed with PLA basic.  The plate and gears were all printed with 0.2mm strength defaults.  My plate experienced some warp/lift up in the corners, so this part will require bed clamps.  I am making some right now and may re-print it.  But I filed down some of the rough spots and cleaned up the corner pins…which result in satisfactory operation.

The pins are modeled @ 0.500", and the gear holes are 0.507", which produces a pretty good fit, but it helped to run a ½" drill bit through the holes to clean up the seam a touch.

These gears were designed by me with a bespoke gear design program that I created in excel.  The gear teeth have a modified profile (increased tooth thickness) for aesthetics and strength, and it was also optimized to achieve the desired center distance to get 25 gears on a plate that would still fit in the X1C bed.