Scale Cube

prusaprinters

<p>Scale cubes were first used by NASA to give a size and orientation reference in photographs of meteorites and moon rocks. I recently saw them in a Smarter Every Day video about NASA's storage of moon rocks (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxZ_iPldGtI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxZ_iPldGtI</a>) and decided that I needed my own.</p> <p>I've designed the text orientation to match what I've seen of the NASA scale cubes. NASA looks like they use 10mm cubes, but I've printed mine at 20mm. I haven't seen the text size legend on the NASA cubes, but I found other cubes online that included it.</p> <p>The design is rather parametric, so you should be able to easily modify the SCAD file to produce a cube of whatever size you desire. I've included 10mm and 20mm for download.</p> <h3>Post-Printing</h3> <p>For the black on the outside, yellow lettering cube, I used a flat foam brush to paint the outside of the cube with a black acrylic paint (Black 3.0) then scraped the edges of the cube with an xacto knife to let the yellow show through. That black paint isn't overly sturdy, so I finished the whole cube with a clear lacquer spray.</p> <p>For the yellow cube with black letters, I used a cheap black acrylic paint in a squeeze bottle with a fine plastic tip to paint in the letters.</p> Category: Tools