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I've really gotten into 3D printing since our family got an awesome Bambu printer last fall.
I find SO many household problems that can be solved, or projects that can be done better, by quickly making little custom parts like these.
What are they? Doesn't matter!* They printed in 5 minutes and helped me with a project. (And I'm still making all of my custom models in TinkerCAD, a web app designed for children, because it's so fast and easy.)
* installing some custom cove lights in my office
@marcoarment my 10 year old daughter is saving her allowance to buy one, so I’ve told her we could split the cost. She’s thinking the Bambu A1 mini, and I think she may want to go up in size to the A1 full (or I will). We will almost certainly use Tinkercad as she uses it at school.
Which printer did you get? Worth upgrading to an enclosure or adding an MDS? I’m thinking about starting cheap so we can see if the hobby sticks.
@dstan Enclosures help a lot if you want to go beyond basic PLA filament.
(PLA can get you very far. Its main weakness is warping at high temperatures. But for common indoor household objects, it's absolutely fine.)
I have the Bambu H2S, which is awesome, albeit massive, and can print nearly anything. If I wanted something smaller, I'd probably get the P2S. But that's a big jump up in price from the A1 series.
@marcoarment I bought a Bambu Lab 3D printer for £320 (A1 combo) and it immediately paid for itself when the hanging brackets on a curved, sliding shower door broke. No spares available, it would have to be a total shower replacement which would have cost over £1000 (and that's installing it myself). Or I could design and print replacements... which is exactly what I did and 2 years later still working perfectly. I used Onshape for design duties.
@marcoarment I’m just starting to look at printers. Which one did you get?
@wingedpig Bambu H2S. It's huge, and absolutely amazing.
If it disappeared, I'd replace it with the exact same one.
If I wanted something smaller, I'd get a P2S.
@marcoarment @wingedpig
2nded - I bought an A1-Combo last spring before P2S existed. It Just Prints. No fuss.
Would 100% recommend P2S-Combo as starter printer.
Go for A1 if you want cheaper but don't skip the AMS even if you think you'll never print multi-colour, it's good for more than that.
@marcoarment I resisted a long time but I’m driving headlong into gridfinity now. Maker world has done stupidly great parametric grid box makers
@marcoarment their filament stock is so in the shitter lately but same
And this is what those 3D-printed brackets enabled: finally, some soft, indirect cove lighting in my office.
I adhered two parallel LED strips (Waveform dim-to-warm, of course!) to 20mm-wide aluminum strips.
The rectangle pieces perfectly aligned the aluminum strips during assembly.
The long bracket with the triangles rests in the triangular channel created by the moulding, and props up the LEDs at an ideal angle to bounce off the ceiling without being directly visible to people in the room.
@marcoarment I think this deserves an office tour.
@marcoarment this needs a diffusor on top
@moritzdietz It really doesn’t. The ceiling diffuses it so well that it looks continuous, and adding one to the strips (even if I could find a 20mm-wide one) would just trap more heat and reduce light output.
@marcoarment Ah nice! Yes, I was wondering if the photo did it justice in terms of looking not continuously distributed. At work we have these huge hallways with amazing lighting and I always wished I had these at home too.
@marcoarment noob question: which LED strips and what controls those? Inspiring as always!
The triangle brackets are printed in Bambu PC (polycarbonate) for high thermal tolerance, well above the rated temperature that these strips will ever reach.
(I love over-engineering things a little bit. I printed the drain-grate-puller tool in carbon-fiber-reinforced PA6 for more strength than it will ever possibly need.)
@marcoarment after over 200 models in TinkerCAD I recently switched to Valence 3D as I needed more control on smaller details. #recommended #ipad #pencil
@marcoarment I built a stabilized platform for my Bambu A1 Mini in December and printed presentation boxes for gaming dice as Christmas gifts for my family. Designed them, yes, in Tinkercad — it's basic, but you can do a hell of a lot with the basics when you think architecturally. (I bought the dice.)
@marcoarment TinkerCad is easy and has more features than people might expect
@marcoarment thanks for the tip on Tinkercad. I don’t have a 3d printer but our local library has a Bambu and a Formlabs printer which i can use and a simple free CAD app might be just the motivation i need to sign up for training to use those.
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