South Africa Keychain

This 3D model highlights the nine provinces of South Africa. By running a loop through the landlocked country of Lesotho, you can make a keychain.

The design process is easy and you can use it to create your own custom keychains:

• Draw or trace an outline with a Sharpie marker and take a photo
• Fill in the outline with a Sharpie and take another photo from the same angle and distance
• Convert both photos to SVG format using an online converter (like this one)
• Import the SVGs to Tinkercad and extrude so the outline is taller than the filled-in shape
• Do your best to position, align, and size the outline and the shape to match
• Export as STL and 3D print (see Pro Tip below)
• Color the embossed lines with a Sharpie or other paint marker

Pro tip: Sometimes when printing text or lines, and depending on the width of those lines, a 3D printer will print thin walls with gaps inside the lines. You can see this in the green photo. By tweaking settings you might be able to get your printer to fill in those gaps. What worked for us here was to set Wall Thickness to 1 Shell, resulting in the nicer-lined blue model shown in the cover photo.

You can read more about this design and about 3D printing in South Africa at Hacktastic.

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Twitter: twitter.com/mathgrrl

Hacktastic blog: www.mathgrrl.com/hacktastic

Shapeways geekhaus store: www.shapeways.com/shops/mathgrrl

This design has a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license, which means that you can print, remix, and use this model with design credit to mathgrrl, but if you want to sell something then you should ask first, at [email protected].

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