The Tennessee
The river that goes the wrong way
▶ Play it onlineThe Tennessee flows southwest, turns almost due west, and then runs north again to reach the Ohio — a course that makes no sense until you are holding the terrain. Its headwater pieces are the oldest mountains on the continent, and several of them are rivers that were flowing before the ridges around them existed. The French Broad, one of its pieces, is among the handful of rivers in the world older than the range it cuts through.
What a child works out
- Rivers do not always run south, and the map explains why this one does not.
- Older than the mountains: some valleys were here first and the range rose around them.
- Every named piece here is a river you can find on a road map.
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 Tennessee.
The plate
- Pieces
- 13 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 2.8 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 5.8
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 105 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
8 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
- Clinch
- Duck
- Elk
- French Broad
- Hiwassee
- Holston
- Holston 2
- Little Tennessee
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
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A continent divided only by where water goes
No countries, no states. Twenty-nine pieces, each one the whole territory that drains into a single river.
- Pieces
- 29 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 49.4 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Mississippi
The basin that drains a third of a continent
Fifteen pieces — Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Red, Illinois — that together are about three million square kilometres of drainage.
- Pieces
- 13 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 14.5 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
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The river before the Missouri joins it
Twenty-one pieces — the Minnesota, the St Croix, the Wisconsin, the Des Moines, the Cedar — draining the northern half of the Mississippi.
- Pieces
- 16 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00