Customizable Slinky

thingiverse

This Customizer can transform any drawn shape into a flexible, springy slinky. It also includes a generator for stars and polygons, with the added feature that a polygon with a high number of points morphs seamlessly into a perfect circle. The profile boasts a separator between coils to minimize surface contact and make them easily detachable by hand or with a knife or spatula. With default settings and 0.2mm print resolution, I successfully separated individual coils manually, but it's much faster and easier with a sharp blade or a flat tool. When the separator thickness is set to zero, the profile reverts to its original rectangular shape. Supports should only be enabled from the platform, as they're not necessary between coils. Small parts might produce self-intersecting surfaces, which could cause issues with certain slicers. However, for Simplify3D users, employing the "Merge all outlines into single solid model" setting resolves this problem. The default cat silhouette was converted from an OpenClipart design: https://openclipart.org/detail/1198/cat-silhouette. I utilized the Inkscape to OpenSCAD converter http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1065500 and copied the resulting path into slinkify.scad, making it ready for use.