Small Grid Beams

I am running a robot summer camp in a few weeks and using 3D printed grid beams for the structure and mechanical components. The beams have 8mm and holes of 4mm, I use M4 screws and it feels really nice.

You can have enough rigidity and clamping to do some interesting desk tools and some serious and not so serious mechanical contraptions! I have never built with real size grid beams, so I don’t know if it’s good for prototyping on other scales :slight_smile:

But with the little ones, a little box like this goes a long way.

The robots are coming out great and I wanted to share the 3D printed models with some friendly and experienced grid beam builders! I plan to do a replicad version of it (thanks @mikey for the link!) but for now this is what I’m using:

https://www.bananabanana.me/gridbeam_20250609.zip

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Very cool! Where you based?

Grid Kit / Village kit is still chugging along slowly.

I’m terrible at updates!

Recently got a printer myself so will def try these out!

I wonder if you could print connectors like Meccano ones… :thinking:

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Hey! I’m Brazilian based in Stockholm.
I am looking forward to see what you all have been cooking there! :3
This project as a whole was a huge source of inspiration.

It’s really fun to build with these 3D printed beams but honestly I think metal/wood or even mâché paper would be a much more interesting material :eyes:

My experience with 3D printed screws and connectors is that they wear out too easily unless they are larger and have smoother angles. For this scale I think metal or injection moulded harder plastic works best for my ~intense use~ hahaha

There is a related project that explore some interesting open source table machines ideas made with the same kind of system https://bitbeam.org/

Hey, a fellow Swede, almost anyway :slight_smile: I´m in up in Härnösand (close to Sundsvall) and aiming to make wooden GB primarily but like [Rongomai_Bailey] its “hugging along slowly” but its really getting close now. I working on a jigg to make accurate GB manually and most important …can make other jiggs.