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The Aare relief puzzle, seen at an angle
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15 piecesSwitzerland

The Aare

Switzerland's own river, whole

▶ Play it online

Almost every Swiss city is on this plate, and none of them are marked. The Aare gathers the Reuss and the Limmat before it reaches the Rhine, which means that in drainage terms most of Switzerland is one river's country. For a Swiss child this is the moment the abstraction becomes local: the lake you swim in, the river through your town and the mountains you ski on are three parts of the same piece.

What a child works out

  • Your local river belongs to a bigger one, which belongs to a bigger one still.
  • The Swiss plateau is a basin, and you can see its edges.
  • The high white ground in the south is where all of it starts.
CHF 15.00

A download, to print yourself

  • A .3mf file with the colours already assigned
  • One STL per piece, for any other slicer
  • A print guide with the settings and the order to print in
  • For your own use; the licence is in the download

What you need to print it

  • A build plate that takes 250 × 176 mm: the Bambu Lab A1, P1S and X1C (256 mm) do, the A1 mini (180 mm) does not
  • A multicolour setup such as an AMS, for the colours as designed

Printed it? Got an idea?

Send me photos of your print and I'll add them to this page — or tell me what you'd add, leave out or change on The Aare.

The plate

Pieces
15 pieces

9 named; the rest are sub-basins the source data leaves unnamed.

Plate
250 × 176 mm

B5 — the size of a school exercise book.

Scale
1 mm ≈ 1.1 km

How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.

Vertical exaggeration
× 1.05

Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.

Thickness
8.8 mm
Smallest piece
182 mm²

Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.

Fit
0.35 mm clearance

Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.

Material
PLA, printed in Switzerland

Every named piece

  • Emme
  • Kander
  • Limmat
  • Lütschine
  • Reuss
  • Saane
  • Suhre
  • Wigger
  • Zihl

Zoom in, zoom out

A piece of each of these is the subject of the next one. Each plate is redrawn at its own scale, so it is a real map at every level rather than an enlargement of the one above.

Follow the water — The Rhine down to the river that runs through Zürich

  1. Level 1
    The Rhine1 mm ≈ 3.4 km
  2. Level 2
    The Aare1 mm ≈ 1.1 km
  3. Level 3
    The Limmat1 mm ≈ 517 m

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