The Aare
Switzerland's own river, whole
Almost every Swiss city is on this plate, and none of them are marked. The Aare gathers the Reuss and the Limmat before it reaches the Rhine, which means that in drainage terms most of Switzerland is one river's country. For a Swiss child this is the moment the abstraction becomes local: the lake you swim in, the river through your town and the mountains you ski on are three parts of the same piece.
What a child works out
- Your local river belongs to a bigger one, which belongs to a bigger one still.
- The Swiss plateau is a basin, and you can see its edges.
- The high white ground in the south is where all of it starts.
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
The plate
- Pieces
- 15 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 1.1 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 1.05
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 182 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
- Limmat
- Limmat 2
- Reuss
- Saane
- Zihl
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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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
- 15 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 14.5 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Upper Mississippi
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
- 21 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00