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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.
I previously also made this custom tool to pull up a difficult shower-drain grate… then also made a new drain filter that significantly improved over the performance of the old one.
@marcoarment kudos for making all that in tinkercad. Can’t wait for you to discover parametric cad. Whole new world of possibilities.
@marcoarment your tinkercad skills are phenomenal!! I can’t do anything but the most simple of things.
@marcoarment how the hell did you come up with the design for a drain filter! AI?
@rjj No! I just had an idea to make a bunch of little hooks to catch hair, and made enough structure around them so they wouldn't snap off.
And when my rattly office vent cover finally annoyed me enough… I fixed that, too.
One more 3D-printing win: I made Tiff a tiny pair of earring replicas of our restaurant's famous swinging lights as a Christmas gift.
@marcoarment There is a "swing the lights" joke here but it's not my joke to make.
@marcoarment with led and button battery in it?
@marcoarment but do they light up?
@marcoarment I’m sorry, this is just the most wholesome, thoughtful thing I’ve seen in maybe a month.
@marcoarment That's very sweet.
@marcoarment This is so adorable.
@marcoarment What are you doing the modelling in? I’m also enjoying 3D printing, but haven’t settled on a modeling tool.
@marcoarment my guy… talk about this on the show!! What the hell?! 😆
@marcoarment inspiring! I’ve never got over the hump of “would I really find it useful”, these examples are really helpful
@marcoarment LLM’s + 3D printing can be a really interesting combo as well. I’m using meshy.ai to create highly detailed figurines based on just a single photograph. Here’s one from our wedding photo. Crazy!
@marcoarment is that photo from the 3D printed version? The quality looks amazing
@marcoarment which material did you use for printing?
@pfernandes That's just black Bambu PLA Basic.
I jumped through some support hoops to print it face-up, such that the face you're seeing was the top face during printing, which gives it that smooth finish.
@marcoarment atoms > bits! There’s nothing quite like going from need to idea to physical thing in a matter of minutes.
@marcoarment interesting times we live in where 3D-printers can help us with hyper-personalised tools & LLMs are helping us build hyper-personalised software tools.
@marcoarment Awesome!
Did you design these two yourself or adjust an available model to your dimensions?
@JohnAZoidberg Just designed them myself with TinkerCAD.
@marcoarment Happy to see you join the club. It’s both fun and practical.
When/if you reach the limits of Tinkercad, take look at Shapr3D. Pricey, but both accessible for beginners and hugely powerful as you skill up for more sophisticated shapes
@marcoarment I started in TinkerCAD and am now getting better with Fusion thanks to Claude.ai. Sometimes it gives me steps for older versions of the tool but we get there. I made a custom MagSafe adapter for my dash cam in Fusion far easier than the additive/subtractive approach of Tinker but I would have never of figured it out without Claude.
