Construction kit toys are cited by many adults as sparking great creativity and engineering talent in their youth. LEGO, Meccano, K’NEX, Lincoln Logs—these are all great commercial options. But what about printing your very own construction kit at home? Meet Stemfie.
Fundamentally, Stemfie isn’t that different from any other construction kit you might have seen before. It has various beams and flat plates that are full of holes so they can be assembled together in various ways. It also uses bolts, spacers, and small plastic nuts that can be tightened using a special hand tool. Think of a mixture between LEGO Technic and Meccano and that will get you in the ballpark. It includes neat motion components too, including gears, wheels, and even a large flat spring!
What can you build with it? Well, as every construction kit toy says, you’re only limited by your imagination! However, if your imagination is especially small, you can just use the Stemfie 3D YouTube channel for inspiration. It features everything from a ping pong ball catapult to a rubber-band driven car. Plus, since it’s all 3D printed, you can simply scale up the parts and build even bigger designs. Like a giant catapult that can hurl entire water jugs. Fun!
We’ve seen other projects in this vein before. One of our favorites is [Ivan Miranda]’s giant 3D printed assembly kit that he uses to build big monster toys.
heh this is a great example of how i’ve had a 3d printer for a decade now and i’ve made about 120 projects and i’ve only used about 5 rolls of filament. for building toys, i’ve made replacement parts and i’ve made add-ons that were missing from the original kit. but i’d never print a whole set…injection molding at a factory is just such an effective way to churn out hundreds of identical parts.
They’ve given a lot of thought to this system, including a calibration set to allow a new user to tune their printer/slicer settings to ensure good fits. At the bottom of the stemfie.org page there are links to a “quick-print sample” and a more comprehensive “STEMFIE Calibration Sample.” The calibration sample includes threaded and locking fasteners along with a couple of tools for the fasteners. If you can assemble the calibration objects, you should have the proper settings to print the rest of the collection.
I’ve got a friend who is interested in the project: it will be interesting to see if we can exchange threaded parts…
I was surprised at how well thought out the fasteners are. They are flat on the bottom to ensure good adhesion to the bed.
This weekend, I finally got a couple of good prints of the calibration sample. Even if I end up not working with the set anymore, it forced me to tune my setup and put effort into bed leveling and adhesion. Either the calibration or quick-print file may become my new printer tuning file.
Next up: gears!