Living Hinge Earring

thingiverse

After seeing some laser cut living hinge earrings, I thought it would be fun to do 3D printed versions. I came out with a variety of designs and even tried layering some to make them multi colored. I used Tinkercad to make these and also have a tutorial on Instructables where I go into more detail about designing and printing them. Instructables: https://www.instructables.com/id/Living-Hinge-Earrings/ Tinkercad: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/1GWQ0EntjiY The pictures mostly show just 1 design (the diamond middle hinge) but I have 8 variations. I recommend you print single color (or two color if you change color halfway through) designs at about 1.2mm or 6 layers. This seems to give you the best combination of flexibility and stability. For some of the deigns, I did print them up to 1/8" thick so it's possible for SOME but not for all. But when it gets this thick it gets harder to put on a jump ring and it kind of wants to flop all over. As I mentioned, most likely you'll print this as one color and that's great, but I also found switching the color halfway through helps the design pop a bit more when bent. For 3 or more color layer designs you need to be careful. I noticed the more colors I added, the more unstable the earring became and it was more likely to crease then bend well. For these ones, the base color needs to be 1mm or 5 layers at least I would say. Then the smaller colors going up only need to be .4mm or 2 layers each. The files are already designed this way but I wanted to explain them. For these designs I have them attached as a single file and also as separate files in case you have a multi media extruder and want to bring them in as separate pieces to get different colors.