The Po
The Alps and the Apennines, draining to one plain
▶ Play it onlineThe Po basin is a trough with mountains on three sides, and that is exactly how it feels in the hand: white Alpine pieces along the north and west, the lower Apennine pieces to the south, and the flat plain between them where nearly all of northern Italy's agriculture and industry sits. The great lake tributaries — Ticino out of Maggiore, Adda out of Como — arrive from the north as long pieces with a lake printed into them.
What a child works out
- A plain is what mountains on two sides produce.
- Italy's lakes are steps in a river, not isolated pools.
- The wettest ground and the flattest ground are next to each other for a reason.
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 Po.
The plate
- Pieces
- 15 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 2.0 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 1.65
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 102 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
- Adda
- Adige
- Dora Baltea
- Oglio
- Sesia
- Tanaro
- Ticino
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