3D Printed Box Gets Bigger

If you ever watched Dr. Who, you probably know that the TARDIS looked like a police call box on the outside, but was very large on the inside. When asked, the Doctor had some explanation of how something can look small when it is far away and large when it is close up, which never made much sense. However, [iQLess] has been 3D printing boxes in a small area, that fold out to be much larger boxes. (Video, embedded below.) The design comes from someone called [Cisco] who has a lot of interesting print in place designs.

You can find the design on the Prusa site or Thingiverse. The boxes do take a while to print, according to the video below. What was interesting to us, though, is that you should be able to print a design like this to create a box larger than your printer.

There are two versions of the box, a large one and a small one. The small box took about 10 hours to print with an estimated cost of just over a dollar. The large box takes about 24 hours to print on the machine [iQLess] uses.

Of course, any time you are printing hinges in place, you need your printer well calibrated so you don’t wind up with an immobile blob.

We’ve talked about printing hinges before. Printing something large on a small bed made us think of the experiments where a printer lays out a roll of filament for itself.

10 thoughts on “3D Printed Box Gets Bigger

    1. Could this potentially be made bigger? I have a project I’m working on that would require a bigger size. Not sure of measurements yet. But looking at the bigger one you printed, I’d say roughly twice that size?

  1. meh i made a hack i called ‘aavga’, which pretended to be svgalib but rendered using libaa, and in the documentation i explained it could be used to play quake on a terminal. someone else found it, packaged it, and turned it into the ttyquake meme that rocked slashdot half a dozen times over the next decade. the presentation is work too. *shrug*

  2. “When asked, the Doctor had some explanation of how something can look small when it is far away and large when it is close up, which never made much sense.”

    Perspective: ” A correct fastidious demure, or otherwise befitting evaluation, with commiserate consequences, of constituent segmental fragments”.
    (I don’t remember where I read that back in high school, but felt it was worth memorizing.)

    1. Well I did say it didn’t make sense. But the fact that the box was bigger after it was printed than it was when it was printing made me think of that. I don’t think that’s too far out.

      1. Shhhhh! You’ll reveal the secret that a TARDIS compacts its internal volume into a “pocket dimension” by folding a wrinkling space – and everything in that space. Normal stuff from outside can exist inside a TARDIS because while everything is warped, folded, mashed etc – it experiences the environment inside as normal because it’s all perfectly matched. Biological structures are not harmed and continue to function normally. Do not attempt to bring any [redacted] into a TARDIS because it cannot be conformed to the internal dimensional topology and [redacted] will happen, very much [redacted].

        1. Close.

          There’s a clue in the name: TARDIS – Time And Relative Dimensions In Space;

          It’s quite simple, really. The inside of the TARDIS contains every point in space and time. Thusly infinite (to your limited perspective) in capacity. The outside is just a ‘disguise’ around the doorway, set to blend in (this hardware in the Doctors TARDIS is defective, and after copying a 1950’s police box, became locked) with it’s environment. It is after all a weapon.

          It also doesn’t actually travel anywhere. It’s already there. Everywhere. Everywhen. It just decides where/when the doorway is/leads to. This is true for the inside as much as the outside. ‘Decides’ is the correct term, as it’s a sentient organism.

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