The Gyroid is a periodic minimal surface discovered in the '70s. Everyone seems to love showing off their powder printers by making these, so I decided to see if it was possible to make one on a Makerbot. Turns out as long as the scale is small enough, these overhangs and bridges print quite well with no support.

I was printing these dualstrusion gyroids at the Seattle Mini Makerfaire on my new Replicator (they only take about 30 minutes). There's also a couple of single color versions included. You can stack these in all three dimensions to form a continuous surface.

The dualstrusion version comes out nice, but I found I had to do some knife work on it. The Replicator (at least with PLA) leaves some ooze when doing dualstrusion. There is one overhanging point that can't be printed properly even in a single color, but it's small and easily removed.

I made the Gyroid shape in Matlab using gyroid.m and a tool from the file exchange that writes STLs. I used OpenSCAD to adjust those files into the ones I print. GyroidThin, Thick and Half are the intermediates between Matlab and OpenSCAD, so you can make whatever you want out of this surface.