A collection of terdragons.

The terdragon was first described by Chandler Davis and Donald Knuth in 1970 in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics. Fractal curves, similar to the terdragon, are the basis of broad band antennae. Without them cell phones would be much larger.

Like the dragon curve (see thing:66733) the terdragon can be generated in stages. Partially parametric openSCAD code to generate the first 7 orders of the terdragon is provided. Lines that generate the curve are replaced by rectangular blocks whose dimensions can be chosen.

Stl files are provided for terdragon curves of degree 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

The openSCAD code that generated the files is terdragon_3d.scad.

Curves 2 through 5 are to the same scale and use rectangular blocks 11 mm long, 2 mm wide, and 4 mm high. They are printed in red. Curves 6 and 7 are scaled in x and y by a factor of 1/3. They are printed in blue.

The curves are best printed directly on the build platform. Terdragon curves 6 and 7 need to be carefully removed but are reasonably study after separation.

Terdragon 7 contains 2187 polyhedra and takes a little under 3 hours to print. It weights 13 grams. See a closeup image at the upper left.