The printed plate
California lifted out. Every state is its own piece.
The United States
The lower forty-eight, and two pieces you would not expect
▶ Play it onlineNo map makes the surveyor's ruler as obvious as this one. East of the Mississippi the borders wander because they were negotiated along rivers and ridges; west of it they are drawn with a straightedge across country nobody had walked yet. Holding both halves makes the history legible. The relief carries the rest of the argument: the Rockies, the Great Basin, the Appalachians and the utterly flat Great Plains between them. Two pieces surprise people: the District of Columbia is here, small but liftable, and Maryland arrives as two, because the Chesapeake cuts it in half and the eastern shore is genuinely a separate piece of land. Alaska and Hawaii are not on this plate — the extent is the contiguous states, and at this scale nothing else would fit beside them honestly.
What a child works out
- Straight borders and wiggly borders were made in different centuries, for different reasons.
- A bay can divide a state as firmly as a law does — find Maryland's two halves.
- The Rockies and the Appalachians are not the same kind of mountain — you can feel it.
- Rivers were the first borders because they were the first roads.
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 United States.
The plate
- Pieces
- 46 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 20.1 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 18.34
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 42 mm²
- Fit
- 0.3 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
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
- Alabama
- Arizona
- Arkansas
- California
- Colorado
- District of Columbia
- Florida
- Georgia
- Idaho
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- Oregon
- Pennsylvania
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
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 borders — World to continent to country to state to township
More from Countries & States
See all →
Europe
Forty-five countries at real elevation
The political map, printed on the terrain it was drawn over. Forty-five pieces, from Andorra to Russia's western edge.
- Pieces
- 29 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 24.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 6 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
North America
Nineteen countries, Panama to the Arctic
The continent as countries — including the Caribbean islands that are usually too small to cut.
- Pieces
- 6 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 49.3 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 6 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
Switzerland
Twenty-three cantons over the Alps
The cantons, printed at 1 mm to 1.5 km, with the Alps in white and every major lake in blue.
- Pieces
- 23 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 1.5 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 6 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00