During my visit with Lloyd the other day, he promoted the idea of an interlocking Squirrel design.

Him and Rolly made these a while back and they sent me some samples last year.

I love the idea to be honest. I’ve actually made a few interlocking Squirrels even before the laser cutter.

The Squirrel was originally designed to be made from stripping wood manually to make sure everyone could make one.

All my upcoming designs will likely have interlocking parts and I may even convert the Squirrel some day. I’m going to work with this concept longer before looking at this for the Squirrel as this will require updating the instruction sheet (40h of work including QA measures), the 30 page Squirrel HandBook (update time not known as it’s at V1) and the video series for building it (perhaps 50h, not sure as it’s been at V2 for quite some time).

The real concern I have is branching the design into the DIY version and the Laser version. I’d have to maintain the legacy instructions mentioned above as well as the new version.

There is another subtle aspect that I take into account. Interlocking parts have an orientation aspect to them. Also the parts would all be different. Right now, for instance there are six 2″ (5cm) parts on the Squirrel that are all identical. They’re interchangeable and there is no orientation to explain to people during a workshop. If I make the parts interlocking, then the six 2″ parts become six different parts. Now we need to worry about which one to use and there is more detail on how to use it. This aspect will seem more important after a couple hundred workshops. 🙂

After I have achieved mastery with interlocking designs I’ll have another look for the Squirrel.

I am about to release a design that has interlocking parts so stay tuned!