3D printing ideas

[glenrodriguez]

Hello everyone! Normally, where does your printing idea come from? Would you mind sharing your very first piece of 3D printing ever? Mine was a failure so I won’t show it off here. But thanks to that failure, I have learned that I should come up with more realistic and applicable products.

[OG56]

I've had my first 3d printer for about 2.5 months and I am finally giving it a small break. It was running 24/7 for about 2 months straight. I have many dozens of prints now under my belt but still very much a newbie at 3d printing. So far, about a dozen failures, all due to my poor model designs.

I've been 3d modeling for about 9 years and I have a library of models that are potential 3d prints. None of them are perfect so they would take some degree of work to get them 3d print ready.

For inspiration I do look at what other folks are making. There are so many amazing artists out there. Since I can 3d model, I also look at 2d stuff.

This is my very first print. I skipped all the calibration prints and went with my model. It is printed 6 inches tall at .2mm with 20% infill and automatic supports.

[Delvo]

I'm new to 3D printing and new here. I haven't printed anything yet. (In fact, a problem I ran into along the way to my first print is what caused me to look for a 3D printing forum.)

The project I'm on right now and almost ready to start printing for, if I can get the slicer to behave, is the most complex one I have in mind so far, but got put first in line because it's a request from my sister: a ring holder with places to store & decoratively display up to 15 rings. The main body will be shiny glossy black, with 15 not-quite-vertical (slightly leaning back) tapered pegs (cones with rounded tips) on two platforms, which are hemi-octagonal, so the lower one, with 8 pegs, is in front and sort of wraps around the higher one, with 7 pegs. There's a third platform behind & inside the 7-peg platform, upon which a gold cat statue sits on an Ancient-Egyptian-style seat (sort of rectangular but curved down in the middle). Each platform has a line of golden Egyptian-style trim (a series of square spirals) near its top edge running all the way around from right to left, to be made by inserting separate gold pieces into grooves indented into the black platforms. If I can come up with a way to do this, I'll also put a wall behind the cat with hieroglyphs spelling out (in the hieroglyphic phonetic system but representing Modern English sounds because I don't know how to say this in Egyptian) "All of this jewelry belongs to the cat, but you might be permitted to borrow some, if the cat deems you worthy".

Other projects to take on after that (and mostly much simpler than that) include:

• a couple of types of customized light fixture for special applications in my home for which they don't make applicable "standard" light fixtures & sell them in stores
• parts for a contraption I plan to build to replace my old TableMate to hold my computer for use at my couch (mostly wood & metal but with a few specially-shaped pieces that I'd need to create myself because of their special shapes)
• parts for a contraption to open & close my truck's rear window without needing to stop driving and reposition my whole body to be able to reach it
• a holder for a large curved rear-view mirror to cover my truck's little flat normal mirror; there are mass-produced curved rear-view mirrors you can buy, and I bought the biggest, but I want one that's either wider or more strongly curved to include more of the view behind & beside me (again, big enough to call for printing the right & left halves separately & combining them) (the reflective surface will be not printed of course but a clear flexible plastic sheet with mirror-effect paint)
• a custom insert for the truck's storage console
• an adjustable floor lamp holder, so the lamp can stand upright on uneven floors wherever it goes... or at least maybe a purpose-made wedge or set of stackable wedges
• a grate to cover the opening of a weird fake fireplace in my home (behind which will be a colored LED light system, not fire) (yes, this will mean combining multiple pieces because the grate's bigger than the print volume)
• tall skinny tables to put speakers on: still choosing between a small Greek column, a "floating" illusion table that comes from hanging the top piece from the bottom piece on a string/rope/chain, and a third type that would actually be made of wood with metal brackets but would be mostly empty space for displaying a printed statue below the top surface (presumably printed in more than one piece because of size); most likely either an almost-upright-standing dragon, Optimus Prime, or a Minbari war cruiser from Babylon 5
• something to hold my monitor at work several inches higher, but, instead of a plain flat boxy monitor stand, it would be in the form of a pile of stones forming a little cave for a Pernese fire lizard to sleep in... actually, now that I think of it in that context, the dragon scaled down to fit under the top of a hollow speaker-table would also pretty much be a fire lizard...
• coverings for the straight vertical & horizontal black bars at the sides of a set of wooden shelves I already have, probably in the form of vines or branches & leaves

They're all things that would serve a purpose, although sometimes also an opportunity for decoration along the way, so the way I've come up with the ideas has been by considering things I wanted to do and picturing what kind of thing I would need to do them. I'm not much of a "functionless statues for decoration" guy. One exception to that is a palm-sized die-cast model of an F-35 which I already have, which might get a same-scale printed companion B-21 whenever USAF gives us actual pictures/specs for that instead of just artists' imaginings...

[curious aardvark]

MY first prints were practical - as are 99% of my prints.
They were also really simple to design and were different diameter stuffing tubes for my sausage stuffing machine :-)

nearly 10 years later, I'm still using them.
The tubes you get with sausage stuffers, do not fit insdie unspooled collagen stacks/hanks.
The tubes i made, do :-)