Chainable levitating table

thingiverse

I've always been a fan of 'levitating' tension supported tables like this one: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4022977 . I have been wanting to create a chainable version for a while, and here it is. This can be expanded to be as tall as you want it. I make the pieces fairly thin so you could print many at once and get the most height for your money. This is a super cool print, and I'm thrilled with how it turned out. The tower is surprisingly ridged, and even at 13 S pieces, plus two bases, I can still support my cast iron lizard on it. Building Tips: This is an easy build to print, and a hard one to assemble. 1 - I have a dedicated soldering iron set to low heat to fuse prints together. That's how I attached the arms to the S pieces. 2 - There is a small notch in the arm part that is centered. If you hide the entire notch behind the S, you have perfectly centered it. 3 - Use some sort of wire for the cables. You will need to put a fair amount of tension in each one, and it is impossible to tie knots for a project like this. My first attempt was with fishing line like wire, and it did not work. 4 - Don't run 4 support cables along the entire tower. Add 5 small cables for each piece you add. This takes a lot of time, but is the only way I can get it to work well. 5 - Use needle nose pliers to make a small flat bundle of cable at the end of each wire, that use can use to rotate to tighten or loosen the wire. You will need to do a lot of tuning after you build this to get it to balance well. 6- If you want it to stand up by itself to use it as a stand, I would recommend making a heavy large flat base like I did. Use that base clamp file to hold the base down, without permanently attaching it. Letting people slide it out and handle it is half the fun, because it's kind of trippy to handle. 7 - My printer is a piece of trash, and I had to make huge tolerances on those files. You may want to lower them. I included the Sketchup source files, and anyone can edit those with SketchUp's free online editor. Summary: I'm not a very good 3D creator, but this idea is super cool and I could see large wider versions of these being made from wood and chain to be used in architecture, design, and things like that. Those 3D files are a little buggy, because I'm not great at modeling, but I can't wait to see what the community does with an idea like this. The next step for this type of design is to experiment with different base width sizes. Mine is super thin for efficiency, but that limits the balance of the tower. It could hold more weight, if it didn't collapse over from being off balance.