STL to SCAD

Suppose you have an STL for a part to be 3D printed. In this case, an HST double bolt bowden extruder V4 assembly downloaded from: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:515747/ (Click the image for a larger view. For a full 360 view of the part, see the movie.) Sadly, these are impossible to work with.

Stupid pet tricks with OpenSCAD:

• These next three lines import and flatten the STL. The result can be exported as SVG, DFX, or several other formats. I saved it as both bottom.svg and bottom.dfx.

   projection()
     translate([0, 0, -10])  // The original appeared "hover" mid-air.
       import("assembly_v4_rev3.stl");

resulting in:

• The DFX (at least) can be read in again and extruded:

   linear_extrude(height=10)
     import("bottom.dxf");