This ball vise Idea is incredible and I want one. Its a heavy workholding unit that can accept a variety of tools and manipulate things to a lot of angles while working on them. This looks really good for painting miniatures soldering or generally working on small 3d printed parts that I do.
Posts tagged: 3d printing
All posts with the tag "3d printing"
21 posts
latest post 2025-12-06
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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 ]].
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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.
Wow, I’ve never seen or thought of multi setup parts this is very thought provoking, not sure how useful it is as we have good adhesives and stuff for printed parts. I definitely want to try this though
3d-printing is so freaking cool. I love the idea that someone could get a hyperspecific tool to their needs for super cheap. Whether it works permanently or to try out one that you want to spend thousands of dollars on to have well done from some high end materials this is a great application.
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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...
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This is a really uniquely designed print in place bb launcher. I’ve never seen bb’s on a zip tie like that, they look smooth and molded. Interesting to hear about the design process.
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.
Zuberios Mantic clamp, would ya look at it. This thing looks like a handy tool for soldering. Excited to give it a try.
Damn this looks good, I’ve been casually keeping my eye out for something like this for quite awhile, I think this will come in handy for keeb builds. Printing one out as I post this, damn I love 3d-printing.
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.
Dang, love this guys branding. Hooks to get stuff offDaBench, what a freaking cool name.
Non Gridfinity Rugged boxes
gridfinity rugged box openscad
Gridfinity generator uses open scad, so you can make rugged boxes, bins and base plates with form input. not fully custom fit to things, but you can custom size square bins, hole cut out sides and all. From what I can tell, no bento box either. so as long as what you are looking for is square this generator has you pretty well covered. I’m definitely using this for simple bins and rugged boxes.
Someone has created a knock off of the ltt screwdriver and made it printable, and it works really well. I have one printed with 6 different bitholders. I popped some labels on them in bambu studio as I printed to mark them for metric/inch and so on.
I’ve had mine for about a year now, and I use it quite often. I used to be a dedicated screwdriver kind of guy, but as life has changed I’m not working out of a shop with tools at reach as much, I’m grabbing a couple of items and heading to a job in the house or a neighbors house. It’s not 30s to grab just the right dedicated screwdriver anymore. Also having some setup with hex and torx is a game changer. It’s also super handy that you can just pop the bits right into a drill or impact.
Highly recommended print. Sorry for not buying the real deal Linux, I got kids to feed here. I owe you a t-shirt order or something.