The Danube
From the Black Forest to the Black Sea
▶ Play it onlineThe Danube rises in the Black Forest, not far from the Rhine, and then heads the other way: east, past Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade, through the Iron Gates and out across its delta into the Black Sea. It flows through ten countries, more than any other river, and its basin reaches into more than that. On this plate the Alps drain in through the Inn and the Drava, the Carpathians curl around the Tisza, and the Balkans send up the Sava and the Morava, all as their own pieces around the carved main stem.
What a child works out
- Two rivers can start close together and end in different seas.
- A river can link many countries without belonging to any one of them.
- Mountain ranges decide which way the water goes, and so where the pieces fall.
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 Danube.
The plate
- Pieces
- 12 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 7.2 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 6.42
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 132 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
7 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
- Drava
- Inn
- Morava
- Prut
- Sava
- Siret
- Tisza
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- Pieces
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- Scale
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- Scale
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- Pieces
- 16 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Suitable for
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- Price
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