The Amazon
From the Andes to the Atlantic
▶ Play it onlineThe Amazon carries more water than any other river, roughly a fifth of all the fresh water that reaches the world's oceans. It starts high in the Peruvian Andes, only a couple of hundred kilometres from the Pacific, and then crosses almost the whole continent to the Atlantic. The plate makes that shape easy to feel: a thin wall of mountains in the west, and then an enormous, nearly flat bowl draining east, with tributaries as big as major rivers elsewhere (the Madeira, the Negro, the Xingu) as their own pieces.
What a child works out
- A river can start near one ocean and end in another.
- Most of the Amazon basin is very low and very flat.
- Some tributaries of the Amazon are bigger than most rivers in the world.
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 Amazon.
The plate
- Pieces
- 12 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 18.4 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 11.27
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 101 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
6 named; the rest are sub-basins the source data leaves unnamed.
B5 — the size of a school exercise book.
How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.
Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.
Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.
Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.
Every named piece
- Japurá
- Madeira
- Marañón
- Negro
- Tapajós
- Xingu
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- Scale
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