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Chopstick model

A project log for Backflow starship incense burner

A landed starship diorama with real smoke venting

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 05/07/2025 at 06:440 Comments

The guy who designed the chopsticks is made of different stuff than lions.  It was pretty hard to come up with this crude model.  The amount of time they had to design the real thing, between the announcement in Dec 30, 2020 

& the foundation in Feb 2021 was incredibly short.  

These kinds of structures begin with a rough idea & are massaged over time.  The launch tower might have been manely left over from the original 2016 design, which was always going to stack it.  

Technically, the tower had 4 years while the arms modified for catching were revealed in July 2021 so the incremental  change had 7 months.

As slow as lions are in comparison to leet ME's, the memory is still fresh of when a model like this would have taken many weeks of carving & gluing wood pieces without ever achieving the fidelity it has.

A machine that only deposits filament required some compromises from  welded steel tubes.  It was decided to have the chopsticks hook on the rocket instead of being spring loaded.  A friction enhancing O ring should keep them from flopping around.  They're still using a more assertive tab than the real catching pins.

Ideas of fully motorizing the thing continued to be dashed  by the lack of space, the time required for an automated system to reposition the rocket, the extra jig required to stage it off the chopsticks.  The ground jig would still be loaded manually.

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Cura couldn't slice the multiple overlapping rods in the chopstick model.  It needed a remesh modifier in blender.  .2mm voxels might be optimum.

It doesn't open as wide as the real thing.

With everything mocked up without catching pins, noted it would make an entertaining, expensive pendulum clock.  The tower segments below the claw have to be glued to keep it from bending, but also have to allow the claw to slide on.  The top section doesn't have to be glued on, but ideally the claw could slide on from both ends.  

The foundation was a trouble spot.  It should be glued on but has to be wider than the tower.  It could be bolted on the rear by melting a hole.  Only the rear column needs to be held down.  Post tensioning wire would require an ugly top piece.  The tower can be stuck to a sheet of tin with a magnet.

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