Printing a Tensegrity Structure

I came across several videos and posts about tensegrity structures and I became intrigued. I found this .stl file uploaded by an individual with the username Cowski on Thingiverse (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4294837).

Then, I checked if things were smooth on Cura and discovered that it was using quite a bit of filament, so I reduced the scale of the print to make it smaller. Also, I reduced the infill percentage as well, which ended up reducing the amount of filament required. This is the final print I got.




During printing, there seemed to be a problem with adhesion which affected the quality of holes being printed. The final print didn’t have holes that went all the way through. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any drill bits lying around so I went ahead and heated up a sewing needle and pushed it through the hole. Shown in the drawing below. Thankfully it worked and thankfully I didn’t end up hurting myself. I wouldn’t advise this method unless you know exactly what you’re doing. 



The next part was to remove the support. That was prettyeasy I just used a standard filament snipper to get rid of it. Then, I had to place strings to connect the two individual pieces. So there were 6 holes for the “stability” strings located on the edges of the two individual pieces. Two holes to hold the “tension” string in the middle.

The two individual pieces

I placed the tension strings first since putting them later would have been challenging. So I had to measure the appropriate length between the two hooks and tied it up. Then I placed 1 continuous string between 4 holes, so that if the structure falls later on I can shift it around and adjust the height. I then placed a final string between the last two holes, of an appropriate length. (You have to temporarily hold up the structure in place to figure out the length.) And Voila, here is the final structure....



Links used to get insight on how tensegrity sturctures work:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a31932446/string-table/

https://hackaday.com/2019/11/29/building-your-own-tensegrity-structure/


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