The Upper Mississippi
The river before the Missouri joins it
▶ Play it onlineOn the Mississippi plate the upper river is a single piece. Here it is opened up: the Minnesota coming in from the prairie to the west, the St Croix from the north woods, the Wisconsin, the Cedar and the Des Moines running down to the main stem, which is carved into the surface as a channel. It is mostly flat country the ice sheets left behind, so the relief is gentle, and the rivers do most of the work of giving the plate its shape.
What a child works out
- One piece of a big basin is a whole basin of its own when you look closer.
- Flat land still has divides — the water knows which way to go even where the eye can't tell.
- The main stem is the spine; every piece leans towards it.
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 Upper Mississippi.
The plate
- Pieces
- 16 pieces
- Plate
- 176 × 250 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 34.94
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 106 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
5 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
- Cedar
- Des Moines
- Minnesota
- St Croix
- Wisconsin
More from Watersheds
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North America by River
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
The Ohio
Where the Appalachians drain west
Eighteen pieces: the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Allegheny, the Monongahela, the Wabash and the ridges between them.
- Pieces
- 14 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 5.8 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00