|
Gearlands Reshifted |
| 2026-03-19 |
Gearlands Reshifted
Mutazoid was explaining to me that, as he was using regular six-sided dices to track the current gear of the cars in his Gaslands Refuelled games, it often happened that the dice were grabbed and rolled when attacking, losing track of the gear unfortunately.
I started designing a gear shifter in my head. After a few sketches on paper and some reverie, I hit printables.com to find out if someone had already designed such a tool.
My first search was specifically about Gearlands and did not yield much. I defocused to "gear shift" and came across this fidget toy that I quickly downloaded and printed. It came out nice, but unfortunately it sits on its spring, it doesn't sit flat.
On Printables, it is worth exploring for "forks" of designs, they are called "remixes" and successful design yield many of them. I was not disappointed and came across this three parts redesign that looked and is probably more robust than the original item.
Since it is a multipart design, it gave me the opportunity to switch color. I opted for black for the box and the knob and silver for the lever itself.
One last thing was missing, the actual gear numbers. Unfortunately, I only had some medium acrylic permanent markers lying around. I tried my best to write the numbers with as thin a line as possible but I failed miserably.
I packed nine of the artefacts and the acrylic marker in a box that I got delivered (Thanks Anthony!) to Mutazoid, trusting him with the number marking. The prints made it to the table on time for Mutazoid Sunday's game. They performed well I've been told.
To indicate what is the current gear phase, I had printed a twice bigger instance of the item. Its PLA lever broke at my second interaction. I reinforced its axis with tootpicks and PVA blue on the inside and sealed the outside with cyanoacrylate glue. I should probably print the lever and spring in PETG. PLA is sufficent for the encasing.
I don't think Mutazoid made use of this big one, he used a big dice with roman numerals it seems. I guess noone had the urge of rolling it.
