The Rhine
From the Alps to the North Sea
▶ Play it onlineThe Rhine has organised European settlement, trade and war for two thousand years, and this plate shows why without drawing a single national border. The Alps sit white and high in the south, the basin opens northwest, and the great tributary pieces fan out from the main stem like a leaf. Children who know the Rhine only as a line on a school map are usually surprised by how much of Europe belongs to it.
What a child works out
- One river system can cross six countries and not care.
- The Alps are where the water starts; you can feel the drop.
- Names on a map — Mosel, Neckar, Main — turn out to be places, not just words.
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 Rhine.
The plate
- Pieces
- 22 pieces
- Plate
- 176 × 250 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 3.4 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 2.74
- 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
- Aare
- Lek
- Main
- Main 2
- Main 3
- Mosel
- Neckar
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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