Thanks Jon

It took around 2.5 hrs and if I add the last week attempt maybe 6 hrs in
total.

But I would say that most of it is in thinking.

On Sun, 21 Jun, 2026, 5:34 pm jon jonbondy.com, jon@jonbondy.com wrote:

This is very nicely done!  I will have to study it when I have some time.
Congratulations on the quality...

This is a question to the main maintainers, but I think this part is
professional enough to be included in the gallery. Is there any reason it
should not be?

EBo --

On Sun, Jun 21, 2026 at 8:28 AM Sanjeev Prabhakar via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:

Thanks, John
It is definitely a difficult part to create purely in openscad.
I feel someone should work on improving the language openscad if not
adopting python.
There are a lot of wonderfully written libraries like BOSL, but they cannot
compensate for the deficiencies of structured language.

Last time I tried pythonscad, but somehow could not import libraries like
numpy, scipy and a few others including my own library and finally gave up.
I don't know what the status is now, maybe Guenther can share.

On Sun, 21 Jun 2026 at 18:14, John David ebo.2112@gmail.com wrote:

@Sanjeev Prabhakar sprabhakar2006@gmail.com
, understand. I am not sure if PythonSCAD needs a serious overhaul, it has
mostly done what I need for it, but I am more than willing to work within
its limitations.

@jon jon@jonbondy.com, I thought the documentation had a collection of
examples and a gallery.  I could be wrong, because I have not verified that
this exists before making my comment.  Also, my recommendation to add this
to the gallery was done before I studied the code. I am not sure that the
code as it is, is clean enough to herald as an example.  If it could be
cleaned up and agreed that it is of merit, the part is sophisticated enough
that I think it would be nice example.

EBo --

On Sun, Jun 21, 2026 at 10:58 AM jon jonbondy.com jon@jonbondy.com wrote:

On 6/21/2026 7:24 AM, Sanjeev Prabhakar via Discuss wrote:

More important, I think, is that it's a hard object to describe in any
language.

On 6/21/2026 7:58 AM, jon jonbondy.com via Discuss wrote:

I assume that he's talking about the OpenSCAD gallery at
https://openscad.org/gallery.html .  I don't think that much has been
done with it in quite a long time - most of the images have gone stale.

I don't think this is a good match for the OpenSCAD gallery per se,
because this model is really defined in Python, not in
OpenSCAD-language.  (Yes, it's translated to OpenSCAD-language, but the
result is not suitable for human consumption.)  If PythonSCAD had a
gallery, and if this was using PythonSCAD (which I don't think it is,
but am not sure), then that would be a good place.  I would hope that it
would get a bunch of comments since it's quite complex and much of the
intent of the gallery is to teach techniques.

Actually, I think that the PythonSCAD effort should have it's own gallery.
Maybe this part is not a good fit for showcasing different techniques, but
it is, as you say, a hard part to describe.

On Mon, Jun 22, 2026 at 1:06 PM Jordan Brown openscad@jordan.maileater.net
wrote:

Well, I modeled this in plain 'ole OpenSCAD, with only the
RoundAnything/polyround.scad library and a path_extrude() routine I
found somewhere:

This was my first attempt at anything in OpenSCAD.  I'm a programmer, so
I was already familiar with working a language, found its quirks and
just worked around them.  The above is about 5000 lines of OpenSCAD.

For "geometric" models, I find OpenSCAD quite satisfactory, haven't run
into a locomotive part I can't make, yet.  Most helpful are loops, to do
regular patterns like rivet courses, and extrusions, both linear_ and
rotate_ .  modules are the backbone of organizing, once I made one
driver wheel, the others were just a 'translate(...) wheel();'

On 6/22/2026 11:06 AM, Jordan Brown via Discuss wrote: