Posts tagged: 3d-printing

All posts with the tag "3d-printing"

30 posts latest post 2026-01-01
Publishing rhythm
Jan 2026 | 1 posts
Portajohn3 Keyboard Plate
A black keyboard plate with multiple switch sockets, awaiting switches and PCB.
Custom Keyboard Keycaps and 3D Printer
Portajohn3 on the printer

My First 3d Printer

When we got our ender 3 my son was 11. We assembled the day it came in and started the test print that came on the card. We watched as it painstakingly took hours to print the small sample. Already past his bed time, he was there to pull it off the bed immediately.

He woke me up at 5 am to tell me he found an stl online, installed the slicer software, set it up for our printer, sliced his model, got the gcode on the sd card, to the printer and had it running already while I was sleeping.

We had never once talked about 3d printing to this level, this was all him doing the research on his own. Having that interest that turns into an itch that you can’t shake, you must read, learn, and try until you figure it out.

3d-Printed Corner Clamp

Getting ready to batch out 18 apple boxes for the local theater. Need to step up my woodworking tool game here quick on a low budget. Whipped this up up and built the prototype box , went really well. We have 4 in the arsenal now, might do 4 more if we need more assembly capacity. Pretty proud of the first 3d printed thread project here. The design for good 3d prints can be quite different with its anisotropic strength and hollow sections being nearly weightless when compared to traditional manufacturing methods. Its so fun to be able to do it for almost no cost right in my home office.

3d-printed corner clamp printed in black pla.

Isometric view of my corner clamp v1 that supports up to 3/4" sheets and includes slots for dowell points on 3/4" and 1/2" material.

3d Printing Dovetails Experiment

I hit an issue with 3d printing oversized parts that I have not hit before. I’m working on some jigs for an upcoming woodworking project that will involve a lot of repetition. We want to utilize some dowel joinery and jigs for consistency. These parts will be up to 20in in length this is much larger than my print bed.

Here’s where I went wrong, I wasn’t really thinking through my previous applications. They’ve all been slip fit, primarily print in place joints that need to move. My go to offset for print in place on my printer is 0.2mm, sometimes 0.1mm depending on the scale.

A live hinged [[ knife-sharpener-double-hinge-first-try ]].

...

This is a super cool movement, I like the idea of giving access to composable components like we have in open source. You want to build a website you have a bunch of options from raw dogging assembly all the way up to predefined templates that just need your content. Idk if the analogy is perfect but there are aspects of it that work. I see where right now we are somewhere in raw dogging c or python. We have cheap nuts and bolts and some low level things, but once someone needs some coupler like this it’s dropping down to drawing it by hand.

store

I’ve been 3d printing for years, and create a lot of my own designs. Many of them are hyper specific to me, but for the ones that I think others might find useful I will be putting up here for sale, you can buy prints that will show up to your door in a few days. I’m leaning on the slant3d print farm so this depends on your proximity to them. The prints are typically black petg, if you would like a different color reach out to me and I will see what other options we have, or for an additional fee I can print it myself and ship out special colors.

These are all designs that I made and actually use myself, they bring me joy knowing that I made just the thing that I wanted to exist and if you buy something I hope that it brings you this joy as well.

I’ve used these skateboard wall mounts for years, I have 5 in my office featuring new decks in the queue, and probably 10 in the garage to display used decks, and fully assembled boards for me and my kids. I use these for both regular...

...

Custom Keyboard Keycaps
A comparison of different custom mechanical keyboard keycap sets.

This is madness that Wes Bos made this with manifold.js and no openscad! Yes, I have these stupid brackets everywhere, yes, I hand model my own brackets. No I don’t do it enough. I don’t like that these model generators like openscad cannot make fillets and chamfers, but I appreciate the heck out of the speed and automation you can make iterations of things.

Link to the promo video. https://bsky.app/profile/wesbos.com/post/3lo4h7unk6s2i

This is a wild concept for a slicer, essentially he didn’t even make a slicer just a crazy pre-process and post prossess to cura slicer, deforming the part until it doesn’t have any overhangs, creating a normal planar slice, then undeforming the output from cura. He also mentions that the rapid moved needed modified as well. I’m assuming this is because they are generally long distances and not short, without breaking these long lines up we would still end up wtih a straight line after deform.

This tip of using tinkercad to do boolean operations on an stl of a solid gridfinity bin and an outline is absolute fire 🔥🔥🔥. This feels like a relatively simple operation, but to do it to a generated stl proves hard to do in most modeling software, at least harder than it needs to be. Somehow tinkercad got it right and made it a very basic operation to do.

It took me a minute to find the Merge button that Uncle Jessy mentioned, they call it a group in TinkerCAD.

My Firs Keycaps with Symbols
Finally got my first set of keycaps with letters! These low-profile keys look perfect for customizing my keyboard setup.
First Self-Designed Keycaps and Symbols
These are more keycaps from my very first set that I designed and printed myself. Some of the symbols are a little wonky, and a few were too thin to print cleanly.
My First Printed Keycaps Are Here
Completing my first batch of keycaps designed and printed entirely by myself on the Bambu Lab A1.