3D Printed Box Gets Bigger

If you ever watched Dr. Who, you probably know that the TARDIS looked like a police call box on the outside, but was very large on the inside. When asked, the Doctor had some explanation of how something can look small when it is far away and large when it is close up, which never made much sense. However, [iQLess] has been 3D printing boxes in a small area, that fold out to be much larger boxes. (Video, embedded below.) The design comes from someone called [Cisco] who has a lot of interesting print in place designs.

You can find the design on the Prusa site or Thingiverse. The boxes do take a while to print, according to the video below. What was interesting to us, though, is that you should be able to print a design like this to create a box larger than your printer.

There are two versions of the box, a large one and a small one. The small box took about 10 hours to print with an estimated cost of just over a dollar. The large box takes about 24 hours to print on the machine [iQLess] uses.

Of course, any time you are printing hinges in place, you need your printer well calibrated so you don’t wind up with an immobile blob.

We’ve talked about printing hinges before. Printing something large on a small bed made us think of the experiments where a printer lays out a roll of filament for itself.