Parametric hex grid drawing template

Hex grid drawing template. Whether you are making first sketches for a new boardgame in your notebook, or drawing D&D maps or old school wargame maps on big sheets of butcher paper, or just believe that hexagons are the bestagons, here's a quick way to lay out a hexagonal grid of any size. It will even allow you to create grids of stretched hexagons - stretched either toward two parallel sides or toward two opposite points. You can even make coffin shapes or something like a muffin profile, as long as it is a bilaterally symmetric hexagon that can tessellate the plane. (For weirder tessellating hexagons, you'll have to wait until an update, or another model entirely; they have a lot of moving parts, and the parametric tools in Fusion 360 don't make it easy to build a model that can do both styles of variation - bilaterally symmetric and point-symmetric irregular hexagons.)

The .f3d model lets you set the following parameters in Fusion 360:

• the number of hexagonal cells in the grid on your template (verticalHexes and horizontalHexes)
• hexHeight is the distance between parallel sides (the base and top). If you leave everything else default, this is the pitch of the hex grid in all three directions.
• the width of the opening for your pencil (pencilTrackWidth) - but see below for notes on calibrating this.

If you want to get fancy and and stretch the hex grid into other shapes, you can specify:

• hexWidth. By default, this is defined as hexHeight*2/sqrt(3), which yields a regular hexagon. By setting it manually, you can make vertically stretched lozenge shapes or horizontally stretched pointy-ended racetrack shapes.
• waistHeight. You can go one step further and change the proportions between upper and lower halves of the hexagon, to create, for example, coffin shapes (alternating columns will have these flipped with respect to one another).
• baseLength. This changes the length of the bottom and top parallel sides, making possible shapes approaching rhombuses or rectangles.

in addition, if you wish you can set:

• the total thickness of the template (templateThickness). Default 1mm; as little as .4mm is possible I think, or up to 2mm or so for a sturdier tool
• the length of the arms of the crosses, expressed as a fraction of the size of the given hexagon side (crossSize). Default is 0.3 (so the Y arms are 1.7mm long if you have a 5.77mm baseLength, based on a 10mm regular hex grid). Going above 0.5 probably gets you into trouble.
• the margins around the edge of the template, expressed as a multiple of the hex size in each dimension. Default is 1, so there is a 10mm margin (from from the center of the outside crosses) to the edge of the template (marginMultiple). This is just to make it less breakable, and you can probably go to 1 or less without any difficulty. Or you can make much bigger margins and, for example, add holes for putting it in a ring binder. 

Pencil opening CALIBRATION:

You will need to calibrate your print to make the pencil openings the right size. I found that when I set the pencilTrackWidth to 0.5mm for my 0.5mm mechanical pencil, the slicer made a much bigger opening, so it was necessary to adjust XY Size Calibration (in PrusaSlicer, Print Settings>Advanced>Slicing>XY Size Calibration. For some reason, this one wanted +0.1mm (while the rectangular template worked better with +0.2). This is the default setting used in the gcode given. 

If you want to set this for a 0.5mm pencil lead, try the gcode or the STL test files for a 1x1 square grid, and see how well it works for your pencil, then adjust from there. If you want to set it up for a larger or smaller pencil, edit the parameters in the Fusion file and go from there. I still recommend printing a small one to experiment with the size of the openings. You may even find that the slicer behaves differently with different angles to the crosses, so you have to adjust XY compensation differently depending on your grid.

*** square/rectangle and triangle grid templates also available! See my other models.***

https://www.printables.com/model/885687-parametric-grid-drawing-template-rectangular

https://www.printables.com/model/889155-parametric-triangle-grid-drawing-template