CATAPULTEGG

Two catapults, one target. How's your aim?

Short video

Catapultegg is an easter themed toy created for the Tinkercad / MyMiniFactory Easter Design Challenge.

Our personal challenges:

1. To create something that fosters interaction between people and makes them move. Not a single player toy. Not just a decoration.
2. To use mainly Tinkercad basic features and the minimum amount of external models. This was for us to imagine new ways to design and also explore the limits of this tool.

Tinkercad files

• Main project
• How to print
• Usage example 1
• Usage example 2

How to play
Each egg contains a target (the lower part of the egg) and two catapults (the superior halves). You can find some projectiles too. To launch them, just put them in the little basket of your catapult arm, tension the arm and release it. You can hold your catapult base with your other hand. Be careful, short shots require just a little pressure on the arm.

The rules of the game are up to you. Although you can practice alone, it's more fun if you play it with others. Great fun at the office, using rolled papers as projectiles!

Printing

• You need 2x upper parts, 1x lower part and as much rocks/projectiles as you want.
• The suggested part orientation for printing is here.
• You will need supports for all the egg parts.
• PLA is perfect if you print the parts with the suggested orientations.
• Infill is only used at the egg base: 20% is OK.
• The egg parts were designed for 3 walls (1.2mm for a 0.4mm nozzle).
• Printing time: 5 hours @ 50mm/s, using 0.2mm layer height, with supports and a raft.

Design
The base of Catapultegg is a not-so-low-polygon egg that many users were already using for the easter challenge (this is already widely used in Tinkercad and we could not trace it origins). It has been hollowed and heavily modified with Tinkercad's basic tools.

We printed multiple iterations looking for a thickness value that provided elasticity but did not break with little torsion. At the same time, different arm lengths and basket position were tried, as they changed the shooting angle and the arm strength. Layer orientation proved to be very important: if the layers are perpendicular to the arm, you can only make short shots or it will break.

Future work
The parts are fitting tight with a 0.1mm tolerance, so maybe more tolerance could be added.

Creators
Nicolás Icard  MyMiniFactory  Tinkercad
Pablo Aguado  MyMiniFactory  Tinkercad

License
CC-BY 3.0