Posts tagged: 3d printing

💭 The 3D Printed Ball Vise Every Creative Should Own - YouTube

2025-12-06T15:22:45Z

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.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

My First 3d Printer

2025-11-12T09:04:00Z

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

2025-11-11T21:13:07Z

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

2025-10-12T20:34:35Z

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.

I’ve fit things together before #

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.

knife sharpener double hinge first try

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

And in the hinges of [[ a-box-of-caps-and-a-macropad ]].

Experimenting for feel #

Fitment like this is a lot dependent on the tolerences of your printer and the feel you are going for. I went to school as a mechanical engineer and theres a lot of science behind press fit joints, that’s not happening in my house on my desktop printer. Most of us don’t have that kind of ability to gauge our outputs so I’m doing like a cook in the kitchen and going for feel.

Here are all of the experiements lined up.

Fillets #

I again, I feel like I should have known better. 3d printers generally have 0.4mm nozzles, common sizes you can get 0.2mm, 0.4mm, 0.6mm, and 0.8mm. This leaves us with the sharpest corner we can do at 0.2mm.

Diagram courtesy of gpt-5.

Potentially overkill #

In order to make sure that the flat edges of the dovetails are what are making contact and not corners binding I made the inside fillet 0.6mm and the outside 0.4mm. This 0.4mm radius (0.8mm diameter) is double my nozzle size, and will cause the printer to follow a smooth curve rather than start and stop and potentially overflow a bit. This difference in fillet size will also leave a little room for error and allow the important flat faces to mate together.

Here are the test results after filleting the edges of the dovetails to compensate for printer errors.

Fillets

Before Fillets

After Fillets

TLDR What works for me #

After all of this, turns out that common sense kinda just works here, 0mm offset works really well on my printer, and leaving room in the corners to keep them from binding up helps a bit, but is probably unnecessary.

0mm offset
0.6mm inside fillet
0.4mm outside fillet

💭 This printed design holds a steel tube where the tube goes. #o...

2025-09-27T02:16:06Z

External Link

youtube.com

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.

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Print over Part - YouTube

2025-09-26T14:15:24Z

External Link

youtube.com

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

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Idea to Product in Seconds #PortalPrints - YouTube

2025-09-16T01:43:59Z

External Link

youtube.com

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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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

store

2025-09-10T20:38:00Z

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.

Skateboard Wall Mount #

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 popscicle boards and longboards, but if you are putting up a thicker longboard go with the thicker size.

Mic stand Clips #

These clips will hold your cables on your mic stand nicely and look nice while doing it. I’ve got them on both of my mic stands, there are two versions, one for a smaller stand with usb cable, and one for a larger stand with an xlr cable make sure you measure your mic stand before buying.

13mm stand | 6mm xlr cable

10mm stand | 4mm usb

Cat Door #

In our house we have a cat liter box in the basement, so we need to leave the door open for our cat. But if our dog goes down there he seems to only cause trouble. So I modeled this door prop to leave the door just enough open for the cat, but keep the dog out.

cat door

Kicker Ramp #

kicker ramp

manny pad

💭 Plastic rollers instead of bearings. Little step forward with ...

2025-08-29T13:31:40Z

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.

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 3D Printable Power Brick Bracket Designer

2025-05-01T14:17:43Z

3D Printable Power Brick Bracket Designer

Generate custom 3D printable power brick brackets for your devices. Design and export your own mounting solutions.

Bracket Engineer · bracket.engineer

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

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 True Non-Planar Slicing is Here - YouTube

2025-04-19T15:39:34Z

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.

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Mantis Clamp by zuberio | Download free STL model | Printables...

2025-02-18T22:24:06Z

External Link

printables.com

Zuberios Mantic clamp, would ya look at it. This thing looks like a handy tool for soldering. Excited to give it a try.

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 The 3D Printed Mantis Clamp! #3dprinting #shorts #diy - YouTube

2025-02-18T22:22:54Z

#3dprinting #shorts #diy" playlabel="Play: The 3D Printed Mantis Clamp! #3dprinting #shorts #diy">

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.

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Custom Gridfinity Bins For ANYTHING! - YouTube

2024-12-26T19:02:29Z

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.

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 How to make a good first impression in business #dewalt #tools...

2024-11-24T20:39:24Z

Dang, love this guys branding. Hooks to get stuff offDaBench, what a freaking cool name.

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Rugged Storage Box, Parametric and Customizable by bulbasaur0 ...

2024-11-06T20:58:54Z

Rugged Storage Box, Parametric and Customizable by bulbasaur0 | Download free STL model | Printables.com

Printables.com · printables.com

Non Gridfinity Rugged boxes

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Gridfinity Rugged Storage Box, Parametric and Customizable by ...

2024-11-06T20:33:58Z

External Link

printables.com

gridfinity rugged box openscad

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Gridfinity Generator

2024-11-04T16:29:57Z

Gridfinity Generator

gridfinity.perplexinglabs.com

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.

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 NOT - LTT Screwdriver - Fancy by Erer2001 | Download free STL ...

2024-08-27T02:13:03Z

External Link

printables.com

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.

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This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

Print in place nuts with cura

2024-08-12T08:54:00Z