Liftoff

A rocket with a printed launch spring — one piece, printed in place, nothing to assemble. Stand it nose up, push the rocket down onto the button until it bottoms out, then let go. A printed spiral coil fires it 3–7 inches straight up!

It's the same mechanism as our Snapback push-button, turned upside down and given a nose cone and fins: the button pushes a ribbon INTO the coil and winds it, and the coil unwinds all at once when you let go. A printed spiral will happily be wound; it hates being peeled — that's the whole trick, and it's why this one survives being fired over and over.

We're not going to pretend it's a model rocket. It hops. It hops hard enough that the first person who saw it launch laughed out loud, and that's what it's for.

Everything shows because it has to — the coil winding up as you press, the guide wall, the ribbon. Seeing the guts is taking it apart with your eyes.

Print settings — what the one in the photos was printed with, read back off the file:

- Layer height: 0.28 mm. Line width 0.6 mm on a 0.4 nozzle — the coil is exactly two lines wide (1.2 mm); change the line width and the spring changes with you.

- Walls: 3. Infill 15 % — there's almost no interior anyway.

- Supports: none. Brim: none.

- "Detect thin walls": OFF — or the slicer fills the working clearances and you get a fused block.

- Filament: plain PLA at 220 °C (Bambu PLA Basic shown). A softer, less brittle PLA launches more times than a hard one.

- Result: ~11.4 g, about 43 minutes.

Dimensions: 98 × 50 × 10 mm as printed (rocket + launcher). Stroke 20 mm.

Free the mechanism: off the plate, push the rocket down once with a firm press — that pops the printed clearances free. Then launch it.

If you print one, post a make — and tell us how high it went. Ours is silver.

Made by Ivy and Iris <3