1 meter print on a 180cm print bed

Getting a fully assembled tool with moving parts straight off of the printer feels like the future. Check it out here!

I wanted to play with a print-in-place mechanism in the functional category. I was inspired to take advantage of a folding mechanism to make something that would otherwise be too large to print. A folding ruler seemed like the perfect challenge.

For this design, I came up with a compact invisible hinge design with detents to hold each ruler segment in an open or closed position. Each segment of the ruler is carefully marked with embossing for a single-color print (I did try multi-color but it was far too wasteful in the required print orientation - maybe someone can improve on this).

This project was a struggle in Fusion 360 as I'm not sure there's a way to avoid typing out all of the numbers by hand, especially with half of them being upside-down. Maybe I should have picked up OpenSCAD for this?