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The Swannanoa relief puzzle, seen at an angle
Drag to turn, scroll or pinch to zoom.
15 piecesBuncombe County, North Carolina

The Swannanoa

One valley, fifteen creeks

▶ Play it online

At roughly 163 metres to the millimetre this is the most detailed plate offered, and the pieces are not named rivers — they are the creeks and hollows that feed one modest mountain river. That is the point. Four zoom levels above this, the Swannanoa is a speck inside the Mississippi's Ohio piece; here it fills a whole B5 plate and every fold of ground is legible. It is the puzzle that makes the abstraction land: this is what all of those pieces are made of, everywhere.

What a child works out

  • Detail does not stop — a watershed can always be cut smaller.
  • The creeks behind your house have territories too.
  • Scale is a choice a mapmaker makes, and you can hold both ends of it.
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 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 Swannanoa.

The plate

Pieces
15 pieces

Sub-basins, which the source data leaves unnamed — they are creeks and hollows, not rivers with names.

Plate
176 × 250 mm

B5 — the size of a school exercise book.

Scale
1 mm ≈ 163 m

How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.

Vertical exaggeration
× 1

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

Thickness
8.8 mm
Smallest piece
104 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

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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The basin that drains a third of a continent

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Scale
1 mm ≈ 14.5 km
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The river before the Missouri joins it

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Pieces
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Scale
1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
Suitable for
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Price
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