Posts for the month of August 2023

Mouse Trap replacement seesaw

There are some tools you figure will be useful, but it is difficult to really justify investing in them before you have them. And then you get it anyway, and discover how much more useful it is than you envisioned. Getting a 3D printer was that sort of experience for me; I knew I'd find it useful, but I hadn't realized just how useful. Using OpenSCAD and some calipers, I have managed to create replacement parts or useful gizmos that would not have occurred to me prior to owning a 3D printer.

Here is just one example.

A friend of my wife had Mouse Trap, a kids' board game built around a ​Rube Goldberg contraption.

game-box.jpg

Unfortunately, she had lost the seesaw piece, which meant that the contraption could not work.

As it so happened, we also had the game, though it did have some differences.

game-box-2.jpg

The seesaw from our game still worked with hers.

original-top.jpg original-bottom.jpg

So I grabbed my calipers, and threw together a quick approximation of our seesaw in OpenSCAD,

rendered-top.jpg rendered-bottom.jpg

and printed it out.

printed-top.jpg printed-bottom.jpg

The resulting seesaw, though not as brightly colored as the rest of the game, did work, and fixed her game.

If you want to print your own, here are the OpenSCAD model and the STL.