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The French Broad relief puzzle, seen at an angle
Drag to turn, scroll or pinch to zoom.
18 piecesNorth Carolina & Tennessee

The French Broad

Older than the mountains it runs through

▶ Play it online

This is the western North Carolina mountains at the scale you would walk them. The relief is the most dramatic in the collection relative to its size: the plate covers ground that rises from valley floors to the highest peaks in the eastern United States, and the exaggeration is set so a fingertip can read the difference. The Swannanoa piece, the small one on the east side, is the valley Asheville sits in — and it is the subject of its own puzzle.

What a child works out

  • A single valley is made of smaller valleys, all the way down.
  • Where two pieces meet, you are touching a ridge you could stand on.
  • The shape of a town's watershed is the shape of the ground its weather runs off.
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 French Broad.

The plate

Pieces
18 pieces

7 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 ≈ 976 m

How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.

Vertical exaggeration
× 2.15

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

Thickness
8.8 mm
Smallest piece
102 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

  • Big Laurel
  • Holston
  • Ivy
  • Little Pigeon
  • Nolichucky
  • Pigeon
  • Swannanoa

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 — A continent to one creek, cut by ridge lines with no borders

  1. Level 1
    North America by River1 mm ≈ 49.4 km
  2. Level 2
    The Mississippi1 mm ≈ 14.5 km
  3. Level 3
    The Ohio1 mm ≈ 5.8 km
  4. Level 4
    The Tennessee1 mm ≈ 2.8 km
  5. Level 5
    The French Broad1 mm ≈ 976 m
  6. Level 6
    The Swannanoa1 mm ≈ 163 m

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