3D printing
Display Tile
I wanted a wall display for my loose 1:64 cars and couldn’t find one I liked that would ship to the US. So I designed my own: a tile that prints flat, folds into a box and pegs to the ones around it.
Every pattern comes out of one CAD file. Paint a wall below, and pick a pattern to watch a tile fold.
Plan a wall
Pick a pattern, then click or drag across the wall to place tiles. Every tile is drawn from the real lattice geometry, and the tally does the arithmetic: filament, pegs, screws and cases. The bench folds whichever pattern you picked.
The planner needs JavaScript and its lattice data file, and one of the two did not load.
Click or drag to paint. Pick “Remove” to take tiles off. A dot on a swatch means that pattern has been printed and fitted.
How it works
The tile prints as a flat cross: a base panel with four walls laid out around it, joined by living hinges. Fold the walls up, the mitred corners close, and T-shaped locks with a small detent click them shut. A clear acrylic case drops in and a lip holds it. Pegs push into sockets along each edge, so tiles join their neighbours in any arrangement the wall allows.
It's flat-pack because flat prints well. No supports, no bridging, nothing overhanging past 45°. The whole thing is one part: the pegs snap off a sprue printed with it.
Every pattern comes out of the same file. The lattice is generated, not drawn: change one line and the tile rebuilds with a different fill. Five generator families share one pipeline. Some patterns are shapes stamped on a grid, some are line networks thickened into ribs, some are partitions of the panel that get inset, some are packed circles or bubbles, and one is a blank template for cutting your own. The mounting bosses phase themselves into whichever pattern is running, so the screw hole and the peg sockets land on structure instead of punching through the design.
It's built in CadQuery, Python that produces real B-rep solids rather than a mesh. That matters here: a tile has to be watertight and a single solid to slice, and the build checks both before it exports anything.
Specification
- Flat
- 211.2 × 179.7 × 4.0 mm, the net plus its peg sprue
- Folded
- 98.9 × 56.7 mm face, 55.7 mm deep
- Holds
- One 1:64 car in a Hobby Lobby bevelled-edge display case (SKU 782987), 92.3 × 48.5 × 50.1 mm, calipered
- Material
- PETG. PLA works, but the living hinges are less forgiving
- Flat, no supports. 0.4 mm nozzle, 0.2 mm layers
- Wall
- 3.0 mm walls, 4.0 mm base, 0.4 mm hinge web
- Lattice
- 1.8 mm ribs (0.8 on pebbles, 1.4 on bloom), 0.35 mm deburr on every opening
- Joining
- Ø3.2 mm pegs into Ø3.4 mm sockets: two per long wall, one per short wall. Half-offset rows still line up
- Mounting
- One Ø4 mm countersunk screw through the base
- Verified
- Five printed and fitted. All 24 build as watertight single solids; nine pass a 0.8 mm thin-wall scan
- Source
- CadQuery, one file, 24 patterns in five generator families
- Files
- Print files aren't published yet
How the page is built
The planner draws from the same source as the CAD. The cells() function that cuts the lattice was run for every pattern on all five panels of the net, and the hole outlines were exported at 0.1 mm, so every tile on the wall is the real geometry rather than a picture of it. Filament figures come from the volumes of the actual STLs. The fold bench is five hinged panels in plain CSS 3D transforms, no 3D library.