LoZ MakerCoin

Lesson Plan & Activity:

• All coins must be made from an initial revolve, resulting in a coin that is 6cm in diameter and 1.25cm in thickness.
• Must not require ANY supports.
• It should be gear-esque in nature.
• NO moving parts (no gyroscopes, fidget spinners, etc.)
• It must slope downwards towards the center in some fashion.

Design Choices (Why this design is AWESOME!):

First off, this design is inspired by a popular game series, The Legend of Zelda. The first design I knew I wanted to have, was the triforce on the top of the coin, with each of the four directions acting as a “compass”, as seen in the Breath of the Wild lettering.

Originally while sketching this, my idea was to have a triforce take up the entire top plane, with Sheika text wrapping the sides.

I had also designed a few other things prior to touching Solidworks (pictured below), none of which were used. All of these designs are recognizable within the LoZ universe and would have been nice to include, but sadly, there was a limited amount of space.

I then headed into Solidworks and began designing. I did multiple versions of the triforce first, as I knew going into it that it would be the most difficult and time-consuming portion of the design. 

Looking at the image above, you’ll notice that the triforce only takes up roughly half of the top face. To fill this in, I added the three “holy” symbols from the game, each representing an elemental G-d. These symbols take up space but also can act as a test for your printer. The lines are incredibly thin and can test how strong your printer is when doing small extrusions and stacking them on top of each other.

Next, I decided the sides felt too bare to be finalized, so I carved & filleted a hole to put rupees in. This adds a ton of depth as you can see here, and was made by a simple 2D sketch and a draft extrusion. I then added the side text in using a simple text wrap.

My final step was adding text to the bottom of the design, which did not come out on my printer, but may come out on yours. It’s a simple text outline that says “Designed by David”.