Small toy, key ring or rattle

thingiverse

A small toy, key ring or rattle features a loose ball inside that is impossible to remove. Conceptualized specifically for use with MakerBot, this design aimed to test how to position and center the ball in a suspended state as indicated in the CAD file. The MakerBot created a thin thread supporting its structural integrity and position, which can be easily removed using a cutter. Designed in Rhinoceros, the object is formed by a single extrusion of ABS plastic that creates a hexahedron with an open-faced area encasing a sphere to suspend it in space. This structure can be simply removed to allow the ball to move freely. To create this design, start by making a 30x30x30mm hexahedron solid and a 16mm radius sphere. Then, create a 15x15 long rectangular base solid, which will only be used for Boolean subtraction from the initial cube. Duplicate the parallelepiped three times, then rotate one plane to YZ and another to XZ before performing the Boolean subtraction of the three parallelepipeds from the hexahedron.