Creating Rhombic Dodecahedrons with FreeCAD

If you’re like me, a complete beginner with FreeCAD, you’ll find it’s an extremely powerful parametric design tool.

I wanted to take my puzzle piece modeling further by testing an assembly in FreeCAD.

See my other article about the Scorpius wood puzzle.

The photo below shows the model I own, which is the “Spider Slider” version without any beveled parts.
It is said that Stewart Coffin only produced 20 of these, which seems quite surprising to me.

To do this, I needed to model a Rhombic Dodecahedron to position my pieces.

I’m sharing the FreeCAD file I used to create it.

• Create a cube in Part Design.
• Place construction planes on the three outer edges; these planes should be tilted at 45 degrees relative to the faces.
• Use “pocket” to subtract these planes from the cube, to a depth of $\frac{\sqrt{2}}{2}$ times the edge length.
• Use the mirror tool three times to make the piece symmetrical along the X, Y, and Z axes.

Going Further

Here are the FreeCAD files for constructing the Scorpius puzzle.

Parscorpius_part.FCStdt

rhombic-dodecahedron.FCStd

scorpius_assembly.FCStd

References

• FreeCAD 0.19 Débutant : Datum Plane et système de coordonnées local
• FreeCAD débutant : Formes liées ou “ShapeBinder”
• Icosahedron using FreeCAD in under 5 min
• Regular and Rhombic Dodecahedrons (less than 4 minutes)