What have been your most profitable/economic prints?

[philwire]

Hi, I'm about to buy a printer in the next few weeks and all I see around me are broken stuff that I'll "fix" by printing a replacement spare part. For example, last summer it cost me around 90$ to have a replacement piece for my Costco gazebo that flew off - I could have printed that for less than 5$!

So, is there anything that you fixed yourself or saved huge money on by printing your own replacement parts?

[bford903]

A customer asked me one time if I could print a new bearing for his favorite yo-yo. Don't know how much a yo-yo bearing costs, but he was pretty happy.

[LambdaFF]

I made the dpt secretary happy with a new window handle : the firemen removed them all because it was "unsafe".
I made a replacement fin for the waterski we broke last summer. I designed but haven't made yet a boat-hook for this season.
List is endless.

[DavidS]

So far:
+I made a centripetal clothing dryer (hand crank), cost $8 to print, would have cost $75 to buy.
+I made a number of linear bearings for upgrades to the 3D printer, would have cost $6 each to buy, cost less than $150 each to print (including cost of BB's for the balls).
+I made some drive sprockets and plastic roller chains for a coming upgrade to my 3D printer, cost about $5 to print, would have cost about $20 to buy.

And I am just getting started with 3d printing, so many more savings to come.

[curious aardvark]

well I make trolley tokens that also work as locker tokens.

usually you have to use a £1 coin.
My tokens cost about 0.4 pence to make.
So for every one I leave in a locker I save £0.99.6 :-)
And if it's raining I can safely abandon my shopping trolley knowing it only cost me 0.4 pence.

Also made handles for our electric carpet sweepers. Cost to make - £0.56 - cost to buy £6.75 plus postage.
And mine are a lot stronger and aren't designed to break like g-tech's are :-)

That said - I'm burning through a cheap roll of pla trying to make some leg extensions for a big garden planter.
Come to the conclusion that I'll have to use better filament, just keeps warping and getting unstuck. So that's pretty much the least cost effective thing I've designed to date.

That said it's still something you can't actually buy - so how do you cost a custom unique part ?

[DrBoost]

I make plastic pieces for my toilet. Don't laugh. The parts were not available, so I would have had to either buy a new toilet, or buy the pressure chamber in the tank (unique toilet). The pressure chamber is almost $400. I'm sure I spent less than $0.12 including electricity.

[ssayer]

All of my deck post caps. My deck posts aren't standard as the previous owner made them out of 3 2x4s. So, buying a deck post cap for them off the shelf wasn't possible. Designing and printing them was easy.