Chess Rook

The Rook, also informally called the "castle" by some (like me), was the second chess piece I attempted.

It seemed like a logical step to take, using the same base elements and modifying just the top. parts of the pawn. The design would match the pawn, and it would be relatively simple to make the changes. (You'll probably also note that the castle development started before the sharp middle had been corrected.)

I started simple, changing the pawn's sphere for a circular wall because I knew how to do that. However, I quickly decided I needed a ring of crenellations for the battlement (the notched wall typically seen on the wall of a real medieval castle). To be fair, I had gotten as far as working on the crown of the queen before seeing how to design the crenellations. I came back to the castle to fix it after the queen.

To get the crenellations, I experimented with the use of a variable (in the most simple of ways). I substituted bb for the value 33 in each translate command in the value for the y-axis position. Big deal, right? Still, it got me going with variables.

// battlement-base=33;
bb=33; 
 // add battlements
 translate([5,0,bb])
 cube([2,2,4], center=true);
 translate([-5,0,bb])
 cube([2,2,4], center=true);
 translate([0,5,bb])
 cube([2,2,4], center=true);
 translate([0,-5,bb])
 cube([2,2,4], center=true);
 // second set of crown 
 rotate([0,0,45]){
      translate([5,0,bb])
 cube([2,2,4], center=true);
 translate([-5,0,bb])
 cube([2,2,4], center=true);
 translate([0,5,bb])
 cube([2,2,4], center=true);
 translate([0,-5,bb])
 cube([2,2,4], center=true);
 };

I would eventually, in later projects, use a more advanced method with a loop command to do these kinds of crenellation effects, but at this point, I thought it was tricky enough to learn how to group the first four cubes within curly brackets { code } and to rotate the group 45 degrees to give a total of eight cubes. At the time, I thought it was a neat trick, and it showed me the beginnings of how to use curly brackets in new ways (anticipating modules, as it turns out later.)

Available Files:

castle02c.scad - use this file to explore and study the design
castle02c.stl - for those who just want to print this design
GPL3 License