The Glatt
A small river with its own country
▶ Play it onlineThe Glatt runs from the Greifensee north to the Rhine through the most built-up part of Switzerland, and its basin is small enough to fit on a plate with room to spare. Three pieces makes it the gentlest entry to the watershed idea — a young child can assemble it in a minute and still be looking at a genuine hydrological map, at 228 metres to the millimetre.
What a child works out
- Even a small river has a territory.
- Three pieces is enough to show a whole idea.
- The airport, the motorway and the suburbs all sit in one basin.
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 176 × 250 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 Glatt.
The plate
- Pieces
- 5 pieces
- Plate
- 176 × 250 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 228 m
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 1.04
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 433 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
2 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
- Rhin
- Rhin 2
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- Scale
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