The Limmat
Zürich's water, from the Glarus Alps down
▶ Play it onlineThe Limmat is the Linth after the lake, and this plate covers the whole run: glaciated valley heads in Glarus, the Linth plain, Lake Zürich as a long blue channel, and the city at the outflow. The Sihl comes in as its own piece. Anyone who lives in Zürich has walked over three or four of these pieces without noticing they were separate places.
What a child works out
- A lake is a wide part of a river, not a different thing.
- The same water has different names along its length.
- A city sits where it does because of the water.
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 Limmat.
The plate
- Pieces
- 15 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 517 m
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 1
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 117 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
3 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
- Rhein
- Sernf
- Sihl
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
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