Years ago, I made a crude, crude, crude topographical map of San Marino in order to make topographical cakes. I had a really good reason for doing so, which you can read about here: thingiverse.com/thing:2617

Since then, a lot has changed. The Thing-O-Matic was released five months after that model, and I got one a year after that. GIS data got easier to reach, and mfussi made one of my favorite scripts ever, the heightmap to STL converter: thingiverse.com/thing:15276

And that brings us to today. The Nuovo Nuovo Torta Tre Monti. It's not yet cake-mold-sized, but I can put a chocolate San Marino on a cupcake and finally have that topographical cake that I have dreamed of for years and years.

A better topo map. A better dessert item. A better world for one and all.

(Update: I appear to have published this item just in time for San Marino's national holiday celebrating its creation! That is serendipitous and pretty cool.)

The coat of arms for the town of Viļaka* in Latvia depicts a smiling hedgehog beneath three flowers: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Vilaka_gerb.png

I think we can all agree that this is a GREAT coat of arms. Now here are some cookie cutters based on it!

* It's sort of pronounced "wee-YAH-kah"

A duck that is also a box for little things, sweets and such!

I was thinking about how to print MetrixCreateSpace's ducky. I considered printing the beak separately, which led to the idea of a little container with the beak as plug.

The beak has been scaled by .97 in all dimensions, which provided the right clearance for my model.

The top third of the head and the top ~10% of the body are solid, because bridges were easier to pull off than overhangs.

The two-thumbed fist, symbol of Gonzo and Hunter S. Thompson. This version is missing the peyote because, well, it just looked like another thumb.

The blog said someone should make these so I did.

I had this model sitting on my hard drive since Christmas 2010, completely forgotten until this blogpost: blog.thingiverse.com/2012/02/21/oo-someone-make-one-of-these/

One hour on the Thing-O-Matic and here we are: youtube.com/watch?v=mebIrOiDggw

It's a very different experience, seeing the model in person. The illusion is not convincing at all for the two-eyed among us.

There's this great set of gears on the following site: jacquesmaurel.com/gears

I couldn't find models for them online, so here's my take. It's just an AutoCad DXF of an involute curve, extruded in OpenSCAD.

The 1- and 2-tooth gears mesh beautifully, though I have not tried motorizing them. I'm currently out of filament so I haven't tried the 3-tooth gear yet :(

I was really sad to see that no one had printed Sean Michael Ragan's gömböc (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10190)! So I sliced it to make it printable without supports on a ToM, RepRap or similar machine.

Does it work? That is, is it mono-monostatic? Well, mine sure isn't. I printed a pretty small one, 4 cm long and 3 cm tall, and it's fairly content to sit on the flat faces near the top center. I think a bigger one will work better. Let me know if you have better results!

Future changes: Having the seam where it is might be a problem, because the gömböc frequently has to roll over it. Ideally, the seam would be along the ridge, but then I would have to worry about warping.

P.S. How do YOU pronounce "gömböc"? I learned it the Hungarian way, which sounds a little like "GUM-butts". But "GOM-bock" seems to be winning out. But I digress.

Okay, backstory. A long time ago, I learned about a cake called torta tre monti, a cake from the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. From the Wikipedia article on the cake: "It is similar to other layered desserts common to San Marino, this one being representative of The Three Towers of San Marino."

I misinterpreted this sentence. You see, I thought it meant the torta tre monti actually resembled a geographical formation, like a topo map. That is an exciting prospect, because San Marino is a jagged, mountainous land, and a jagged, mountainous cake would be really cool.

Tragically, that is not the case! The cake is actually a hockey-puck-shaped stack of wafers. There is nothing topographical about it at all! Clearly I needed to do something about it.

The result is my nuovo torta tre monti, the result of four days of labor. It covers all of San Marino and a chunk of Italy that surrounds it. Each gradation is 20 meters higher than the one before it, with the highest one being 700 meters. I didn't get the lines from a geological survey or anything; I stitched together screenshots from Google Maps (terrain mode) and traced them by hand using my trackpoint mouse.

(That's a point of pride. I did all this with a trackpoint. Go me!)

Cake.