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Models Showcase

Models shared by the SO3D.xyz community. Open any of them in the generator to see exactly how it was built, remix it, or print it as-is. Browse the model library by category

Preview of Woodlouse choice chamber
By Krypto
Complexity
Medium
MAIN PURPOSE: Let woodlice choose between damp, dry, light and dark, and count where they go
A classic biology experiment. The four bays meet at an open centre: DAMP and DARK, DAMP and LIGHT, DRY and DARK, DRY and LIGHT. Release ten woodlice in the middle, cover the top with cling film, shade the DARK half with card and wait ten minutes. Almost all of them end up in the damp, dark bay, because woodlice are crustaceans that dry out quickly and hide from the light that would show them to birds. Count them, swap the conditions round and try again, then return them to where you found them.
AR view Open in app
Preview of Water-drop splash photo rig
By Krypto
Complexity
Advanced
MAIN PURPOSE: Film crowns and jets of water in slow motion as drops fall into a pool
High-speed photographers spend thousands on splash rigs; this one uses the slow-motion mode on your phone. Water drips steadily from a tiny hole in the cup, held high above the pool on a screw-in column, and each drop that lands throws up a crown of water and then a jet that shoots back up. The phone stands in the slot at the pool's edge, perfectly still and at drop level. Add food colouring to the pool, milk to the dripper, and play the clips back frame by frame.
AR view Open in app
Preview of Socket-hung charger shelf
By Krypto
Complexity
Simple
MAIN PURPOSE: Hold a charging phone on a shelf that hangs from its own charger plug
A phone charging from a low socket ends up on the floor, dangling or tripping someone up. This shelf needs no screws: the plug-in charger sits inside it, pins out through the hole in the back, and when you plug it in, the charger itself holds the shelf flat against the wall below the switch. The phone stands in the front, its cable coiled out of sight behind it. It works with UK, European and US two-pin and three-pin chargers.
AR view Open in app
Preview of Two-tone flower vase
By Krypto
Complexity
Medium
MAIN PURPOSE: Split a white flower's stem between two dyed waters and grow a two-coloured bloom
Flowers drink through tiny tubes in their stems, all the way up to the petals. Fill one side of this twin vase with blue food-coloured water and the other with red, split the stem of a white carnation down the middle, and put one half in each. Within a day the petals turn blue on one side and red on the other, a striking table flower and a lesson in capillary action. BLUE and RED are raised on the two chambers.
AR view Open in app
Preview of Venus flower-basket wedding vase
By Krypto
Complexity
Medium
MAIN PURPOSE: Hold wedding flowers in a lattice vase modelled on a deep-sea glass sponge
The Venus flower basket is a deep-sea sponge with a skeleton of glass lattice so strong that engineers copied it for the Gherkin in London. A pair of tiny shrimp swim in when young, grow too big to leave, and live inside together for life, so in Japan the dried sponge is a traditional wedding gift. This tall, round-cornered vase has the same diagonal lattice cut right through its walls; drop a test tube inside, add two stems for the couple, and the light pours through the walls.
AR view Open in app
Preview of Ames-room illusion box
By Krypto
Complexity
Simple
MAIN PURPOSE: Make two identical toys look like a giant and a dwarf through a peephole
Look through the peephole and the room looks like an ordinary box, but it is not: the back wall runs at a slant, so the left corner is twice as far away as the right. Put two identical figures in the back corners and one looks like a giant and the other like a dwarf. Move a figure along the back wall and it grows or shrinks before your eyes. It is the Ames room, invented in 1946 and used in films to make actors look tiny next to wizards.
AR view Open in app
Preview of Cloud-chamber cosmic-ray base
By Krypto
Complexity
Simple
MAIN PURPOSE: See the trails of cosmic-ray particles in a home-made cloud chamber
Invisible particles from space pass through you every second, and this lets you see them. Put a slab of dry ice in the base, lay a 3 mm aluminium plate painted matt black on the ledge, and turn a clear plastic tub upside down on the plate with a strip of felt soaked in 99% isopropyl alcohol stuck inside its top. After ten minutes, turn off the lights and shine a torch in from the side: thin white trails appear and vanish as muons, alpha and beta particles streak through the alcohol mist, just as in the chambers that won Nobel prizes.
AR view Open in app
Preview of Phone-screen photoelastic viewer
By Krypto
Complexity
Simple
MAIN PURPOSE: See the hidden stress in clear plastic as rainbows using a phone screen
Your phone screen gives out polarised light, which is half of a stress lab. Lay the phone in the bottom showing a white page, slide a piece of clear plastic in through the slot (a protractor, a CD case, a plastic fork) and put polariser film on the ledge above. Look down and the plastic lights up in rainbow bands wherever it is strained. Squeeze the fork and watch the colours race. Engineers use exactly this, called photoelasticity, to find weak spots in parts.
AR view Open in app
Preview of Moon-crater impact tray
By Krypto
Complexity
Medium
MAIN PURPOSE: Drop pebbles into flour and cocoa from marked heights to make lunar craters
How did the Moon get its craters? Fill the tray with 3 cm of flour, dust cocoa over the top, and drop a marble from the 10 cm mark on the back board, then from the 20 cm mark. Each impact punches out a crater and throws white flour across the dark cocoa in bright rays, just like the rays round the crater Tycho. Compare sizes, heights and weights, then smooth it over and start again.
AR view Open in app
Preview of Stream-table river maker
By Krypto
Complexity
Medium
MAIN PURPOSE: Watch water carve rivers, meanders and a delta in a tray of sand
A geography lesson that builds itself. Fill the tray with damp sand, pour water into the tall cup at the mountain end, and it seeps out through a small hole at the bottom to carve a river down the slope. Watch it meander, cut banks, braid into channels and drop a fan-shaped delta where it reaches the SEA end, where a drain hole lets the water out. Change the slope with a book under the cup and see how a steep river behaves differently from a gentle one.
AR view Open in app

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