Four Color Scorpius Puzzle

This puzzle was designed by Stewart Coffin around 1970.  He made them from triangular sticks in four wood types. I wanted to create a 3D printed version in four colors.  It is enjoyable to find all color symmetries.

If you have a 4-color printer you can print all six pieces at once.  I did not want to do this as it would waste a lot of material on my machines (printing time: over 24 hours).  All pieces are identical in shape but the coloring of each piece is different, and each piece contains all four colors in every layer.  I have a printer with dual nozzles, so I printed half a piece in two colors. I then glued two halves together.  Among the six pieces are all permutations of the four colors. Note that I have changed the design slightly so that the pieces are easier to print.

Let's call the four colors 0, 1 , 2 and 3. For my dual-nozzle solution print the plate of four half-pieces in colors {0,1}, {0,2}, {2,3} and {1,3}. This gives you enough halves to make eight pieces and allows for rejects in case pieces get knocked over.  It takes some thought to figure out how to glue the halves together to make 6 unique pieces. The pieces contain three holes to align the halves using short lengths of filament. I recommend assembling the puzzle with color symmetry before gluing to be sure you have six different pieces.

Included are two stl files for printing half-pieces, four stl files for printing the pieces in four colors, and one stl file of the complete piece for printing the puzzle in one color. One 3mf file prints four half-pieces in two colors on a dual-nozzle machine and does zero filament swaps. The other 3mf prints all 6 pieces in 4 colors and does 660 filament swaps.