Turn Your Moleskin Into a Shark Dinosaur Monster With 3D Printed Parts

This project is part of a short and fun collaboration with fellow Pier 9 AiRs Artists in Residence Bernie Lubell, Maddy Maxey and Andrew Thurlow. At the beginning of our residency, we were all given these cool little notebooks. For a tiny project we decided to give them a little flavor.

Bernie kicked off with a set of hand crafted wooden wheels and a tail, Maddy with some 3d printed duck feet and Andrew with a parametric collection rabbit ear page-holders.

This Instructable shows you how to transform your moleskin into some sort of a shark dinosaur monster. The design for this was done in Fusion 360 and the parts were printed on an Ultimaker 2. The files are available to download and modify in the following steps.

Things you need:

- A moleskin (or your favorite notebook)

- CAD software

- your favorite 3D printer

Step 1: Measure Your Moleskin

Grab a caliper and measure the thickness of your moleskin cover to cover. Make sure to pinch tight so that your parts will fit securely over the cover. We were using these moleskins, but the design can be adapted for pretty much any notebook or comparably shaped household object.

Use this dimension to modify the fusion 360 model in the following step.

Step 2: Design Your Corner Clips.

The corner clips are the parts that fit snuggly over the corners of your book. There are two types of corner clips. One that fits over the spine corner, and the other fits over the rounded corner where the notebook opens.

We added small dimples in our clip design to help the clip hold snuggly onto the book. Be sure you don't make them too snug or else you might damage the cover of your book.

Here's a link to the Fusion 360 model: http://a360.co/1US7XCT

Feel free to play around + make adjustments.

Step 3: Design Your Monster!

We kept the designs relatively simple so that they could easily print on an FDM printer without too much clean up or supports.

Here are some sketches and other iterations. All of these were designed in Fusion 360. The features (tail, spikes, teeth etc.) are all push/pull extrusions of sketches done using the planes of the corner clips as sketch planes.