Almost everything I print is functional: a part for another hobby, a teaching aid, a replacement for something nobody sells any more, or an object a friend needed and could not buy. A few hours into the print, the flaw I should have caught in the model usually becomes obvious.
Printers
I started around 2014 with a Boots Industries BI V2.5 from its Kickstarter era, and spent years improving, adjusting, and maintaining it. It is still here.
The machine doing the work now is a Bambu Lab X1C, which spends far less of my time treating calibration as a hobby of its own.
Materials are mostly PLA, with ASA and ABS when heat or weather are involved, and TPU when the part has to flex.
Designing the parts
OpenSCAD is my design tool. Describing a part parametrically matches how I think about dimensions and relationships, and it earns its keep when the first version turns into a family of slightly different versions: change a variable, print the next one.
The loop rarely varies. Measure the constraint, model the smallest part that solves it, print it, discover the constraint I forgot to measure, change a number, print it again.
What comes off the bed
- Electronics enclosures and brackets
- Replacement parts
- Jigs, fixtures, and workshop helpers
- Teaching and demonstration objects
- Parts for friends’ projects
- Prototypes for things later made in other materials
I’ve also printed complete instruments, including a ukulele and several violins. They are unforgiving tests of fit and material behaviour, and they are surprisingly good to play.
My public designs are on Thingiverse.
What keeps the printer earning its bench space is that it will make one oddly specific thing without anyone else needing the same object. Electronics, radio, model aircraft, and music all eventually want a bracket nobody sells.