Transforming Christmas Present Mech

At first, it's a merry Christmas present, then you accidently hold it the wrong way and… it transforms into one of several configurations limited only by your imagination! This was originally intended to be a spider, but there's plenty of other poses you can make too. Using snap-in ball and socket joints, this tree can turn in to whatever your heard desires with it's 8 fully articulating segments. Snap the fully round end of the connectors into the side segments first, then the flat sides into the base. May require a bit of force but I haven't had any casualties yet. One of the ribbons parts is a bit longer, here you'll insert the little peg, lid, and bow to cap it off.

This can be all printed on just one plate, but there is a second if you want the lid to follow the ribbons into the bow.

To unfold it, start with the ribbon part attached to the lid by gently lifting up and pulling it back, then you'll know what to do from there. Glue that peg-ribbon stack if the friction fit isn't tight enough and you're pulling off the lid. I made a little dot on the underside of the joint holding the lid piece.

There is a bit of a void inside the assembled box, but it would probably need to be scaled up a bit to get anything decent in there, maybe a gnome or a sneaky elf is piloting this thing… Speaking of scaling, that should work fairly easily since the ball and socket diameters are the same size, just the tiny segment-segment gaps would grow but that can likely be compensated with anyways by the ball joints.

Check out my transforming tree mech: