Many of us (myself included) wasted spent many hours playing Tetris, perhaps on Gameboy, 8-bit Nintendo, or with any of the computer versions that came out. Perhaps you even got to a point where you wondered why a Russian game featured the Space Shuttle as a victory animation. If you’ve ever loved the game, then you might find Rachel Lee’s excellent Tetris Key Organizer entertaining and useful.
Her key holder takes the form of a number of steel Tetris shapes, that when combined become a pixelated heart. Magnets are embedded in all of them to keep them in place, and three of the lower pieces are drilled to hold key rings.
Lee, as a grad student, had access to a CNC milling machine, so all of the pieces as well as the base plate were cut out of steel. She points out that this design could be done on a manual mill as well, or the pieces could be made out of wood or even Styrofoam! She also mentions that if it were done again, she could use different colored metals, like brass, copper, and aluminum, to differentiate between the pieces instead of spray paint.
The build took her around 3 weeks, or 40 to 45 hours of lab time. She is fairly new to running the CNC machines that she used, so much of the time was spent figuring out various machining issues.
Although the end result looks excellent, she would have done a few things differently. One thing she points out is that each piece could have been cut slightly smaller for extra clearance. Before she sanded the pieces (a time-consuming process) the pieces, as they were originally cut, would have been essentially pressed into the frame.
As with any project like this, one tends to learn a lot while doing it, so maybe her next build will be even better!
[via Reddit]
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