A while back I designed a dog treat puzzle for my new puppy, Harvey, and even though he loved it, looking back with more practice designing parts for FDM printing now there are definetly some things I would like to change.
Dog Puzzle R0 Assembled
Now the first thing I would like to improve is just general printability. I did at the time do my best to make this an easy print. Its broken into only 3 actual part files that all print out with no support. The first thing I would like to change that should make it easier on any printer is get rid of some of the filleted parts that cause huge over hangs. An example would be all the treat bowls because the body of the puzzle prints on its end to make it support free, these over hangs are challenging for the printer to achieve in any kind of pretty way. To fix this I want to switch to a chamfered diamond look like in this sketch.
This reduces overhangs completley and still gives a nice amount of space for a small treat to be stored.
The next design choice I'd like to change is how the slides engage with the body of the puzzle. In the original design, or R0 for being the design pre revisions, the slides were this kinda squared off "C" shape. I believe I did this to reduce play in the pieces from side to side on the puzzle but the pieces are already restrained by the side of the puzzle body, and the fins of the C means the only way they can be printed without support is on their side. If we ditch the fins we can print them on their back and have no issues. This first off simplifies the print, but also should allow them to be printed faster as Z is the slowest direction to print in, in my experience, so I try to maximize what I can in the X and Y.
A nice bonus of being able to rotate the slides is now they can be easily customized with new top layers. This can be used for designs or even for color changes to give another accent color to the puzzle. The added flexibility from this allows me to theoretically have several themes for this puzzle all based off the same design and could even make it simple if someone wanted to customize the puzzle they were ordering.
All of these ideas make me very excited to start this project and begin to see R1 of this design begin to take shape.