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I'm developing a board game and it needs a mechanism of incremental rotation in which the rotated object will snap to one of five possible angles. I have been trying to search for examples of mechanisms that snap in increments when rotated but I don't seem to know the correct terminology.

The rotating shaft would be a five sided polygon (pentagon) as in the picture:

Design

What kind of design might work in this case so that after the player rotates the shaft, it always snaps into a "straight" angle so that one of the five surfaces of the polygon is facing straight up?

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A vee-shaped block spung up against the underside of the pentagonal shaft would do the trick.

enter image description here

Figure 1. A badly dimensioned snap.

You'd need a lot longer on the "spring" section of this to allow enough flexibility.

A search for 3D printed detent should give plenty of ideas.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you, very cool idea! $\endgroup$
    – user44109
    Commented Feb 19, 2022 at 15:17
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A spring loaded button and detent.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks. Detent was a good search term. I found this 3d-printable object with an interesting spring/detent mechanic: thingiverse.com/thing:2706672/files Especially file called CipherRing-Top.stl. $\endgroup$
    – user44109
    Commented Feb 19, 2022 at 15:11

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