hexagons are the bestagons

Hexagons are awesome. Tiling a plane into peaces with the minimum line needed.

Nice. Let's build a shrine.

Inspiration was a video from CGP Grey. Mostly the thumbnail and this part from the video.

Get a IKEA picture frame.

Make some CAD

1.6 mm thick hexagons.

The hexagons should be mounted magnetically so you can rearrange them. Also you should not see the matt black background. All hexagons are lifted 10mm over the surface. Everything in the back is painted black to absorb lots off light. Then the Hexagons should look like "floating".

I got inspired from the E3D tool changer that uses 3 round things to stick components together. Just 9isch iterations later I had a very satisfying snap and hold.

I epoxy glued 10mm x 2mm magnets into the hole in the middle.

I wanted to be the middle piece special. Like in the thumbnail of Greys video. I wanted it to be gold. But not gold paint, real gold. For work I stumbled across the side gold plating option for PCBs. So i designed a hexagon PCB with the whole top side and the sides gold plated.

PCBway.coms surface finish looks amazing for electronics but is not optically perfect so i polished them wich made them look dull and dark and i decided against polishing.

Meanwhile i had problems with uneven surfaces from my printed parts. I tried:

Spinning epoxy coating.

baking epoxy coating.

Matt and glossy clear coatings.

Lots of sanding.

Filler.

And finally hole filler thinned with isopropyl.

I slightly underestimated the print and processing time needed for two pictures. After a lot of printing, priming, sanding and painting its coming together.

I wanted to print out the Fusion 360 sketch and glue it on, but due to the corona virus all the copy shops are closed. The alignment was a bit tricky and ultimately done by eye.

Painted the frame black. 3 coats for every color. and packing everything together.

First assembly at Christmas. Turned out all right. I should have taken lighter green.

Overall I am happy with this project. A laser cutter would have made a lot of things easier and faster.

Now I have a laser cutter.