At work we’ve got a 3D printer. In this series of posts I’ll share some of the designs I’ve made.

This is one of the first ‘proper’ things I’ve designed – I wanted to have a go at making something based on an object I already had. A colleague asked if I could make some props to explain coordinate systems, and I was holding a whiteboard pen at the time, so I decided to make a set of orthogonal axes out of whiteboard pens.

We use Unique brand whiteboard pens, which have nice lids that slot onto the back of the pen while you’re writing. All I had to do was make a shape that the lid can slot into, and put it on the faces of a cube.

I measured the radius of the pen lid, and the sticky-outy bits down the side, using a ruler. I assumed that the people who designed the pens had rounded off to whole numbers of millimetres, and I think I was right.

You can download .stl and .scad files for the write angles cube at Thingiverse.