Instead of littering the entire board with threads about 3D printing, I decided to create one centralized place to track my adventures with 3D printing. If you have any questions about 3D printing, I'll do my best to answer them.
Last night I printed this little SD card holder. I printed the one on the right about a month ago, but damaged the bottom side of the print while removing it from the glass print area. I read online that if you let things sit and cool down for an hour or so, they are much easier to remove from the glass. That's what I did with the one on the left, and the little bugger popped right off, undamaged.
According to Cura, this model used about 13 cents worth of filament to print. According to my wife, that means it cost me $600.13, because she includes the cost of the printer every time I tell her how cheap things are to print.
After printing the SD card holder I felt like the USB sticks living in the coffee mug would be jealous, so I printed a holder for them, too. Actually I'm printing a second one, and might end up printing a few more. I have half a dozen USB sticks at work that I am constantly searching for, and a few more at my desk downstairs.
A friend of mine brought his kids over last month. They are super into LEGO right now, so I printed three LEGO figures for them.
This was one of the first things I printed that contained multiple parts and had to be assembled. Like a real figure, all the parts move and work with real LEGO pieces and parts.
The SD card holder is definitely something I would use every day.
And if I were of the action figure age, that shadow Lego person would be stealing the souls of all the other lego people. It's "Death" from Gauntlet or maybe Gauntlet II!
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Tue Feb 27, 2018 10:44 pm
The SD card holder is definitely something I would use every day.
And if I were of the action figure age, that shadow Lego person would be stealing the souls of all the other lego people. It's "Death" from Gauntlet or maybe Gauntlet II!
"3D printer needs food, badly!"
"Baby, I was afraid before
I'm not afraid, any more."
- Belinda Carlisle, Heaven Is A Place On Earth
This was the most complex thing I've printed to date.
The Dalek printed in five pieces. The top and bottom are separate and snap together so that the top rotates. All of the guns and accessories printed separately as well.
The original model was going to be something like a foot tall, so I scaled it back in Cura 50% to get it down to 6" tall. Some of the details didn't scale well, and I ended up with a lot of z-axis banding (all the horizontal lines you can see in between layers). Since printing this I've bumped my standard print temperature up from 200 Celsius to 220, which seems to blend the layers together better.
I actually gave this one away. I'm looking for something to print and paint though. A lot of people spray their prints with primer, then sand, then paint.
Here's an example of a printed model. The printer this guy has (CR-10) is the same as mine.
We had a spare house key made and needed a keychain for it. I found one on Thingiverse that said "SPARE" so I printed it out. I printed it in "rough" mode, which is good enough for a spare keychain IMHO. Print time was 23 minutes.
Also you can have a spare key printed at an automated kiosk at Walmart for $5. Who knew?
Flack wrote: Wed May 16, 2018 8:10 am
Also you can have a spare key printed at an automated kiosk at Walmart for $5. Who knew?
If your key is one of the two most popular ones - I think they're Quikset 66 and 93 - you can have it cut by the automated key cutter for $1.45 - the same price as having a clerk do it - at Home Depot. (My front door is one of these, so I got to try it.) Or you can use one of the specialized key blanks (like extra colors or images) at the higher price for the blank which can be an additional fee from 20c-$2; the key cutting is free. All keys duplicated are guaranteed to work.
Charging higher prices for automated work is the wrong idea. Automating a job removes the expensive human being and should reduce prices.
I've seen other automated key machines pulling this same gouging rate of 4x the cost for the same thing at Home Depot. When their owners discover people are not buying these overpriced keys in droves, the machines start disappearing. They could probably get up to $3, maybe $3.50 where someone needs one key and can live with an extra buck and a half for convenience. At double this, people will wait til their next hardware store visit.
"Baby, I was afraid before
I'm not afraid, any more."
- Belinda Carlisle, Heaven Is A Place On Earth
I know these are tiny and don't look like much, but they're actually "jigs" which can be used to hack/jailbreak a Nintendo Switch. I don't own a Switch, but a friend of mine does and wanted to experiment with the jigs, so I printed out five of them for him to experiment with. The jigs are designed to hold a mini-USB connector which, when modified, can short out the Switch's processor and get it to load Linux and do all sorts of things Nintendo doesn't want people doing with it.
The design for these jigs is not readily available, at least not in the regular places I visit. I ended up getting the design off of a torrent site, which is also filled with 3D printable designs for things like bump stocks and one-time-use plastic pistols. I have no interest in printing gun accessories and selling them, but it's easy to see the market for such things.
I printed these a while back and ended up throwing them away tonight while cleaning/packing.
That's Yamo, Bruce Lee, and Ninja, from the 8-bit Bruce Lee game. I designed them using an online 3D CAD program. Basically, I found pictures of the game sprites online and then rebuilt them using little virtual blocks. Then I added the bigger blocks for them to stand on, and added their names to the blocks. These were some of the first things I ever designed, and I didn't realize how thin they would be once I printed them. I still have the designs saved, so after I move and set everything back up I plan on thickening them up, reprinting them, sanding and then finally painting them. The original sprites only used black, green, and yellow, so painting them would be pretty simple.
