Custom checkers set

My wife makes quilts and various other sewn things. She came up with the idea to make quilted checkerboards for some of our grandkids. 

The back side is a tic-tac-toe board. The design includes zippered pockets to store the game pieces. 

I designed and 3D printed the checkers. They are simple cylinders with a rim, and with the family's last initial embossed on the top. 

Checkers need to stack and connect (for when they get king-ed). Instead of the interlocking zigzags that you see on molded checkers, I decided to use four pegs and holes. The holes are small enough to print without causing support problems. The pegs are about as small as I can go without them globbing up. They really work well - pretty easy to connect, and they stay together during play.

Simple sculpture and base

by Rachel Parker-Stephen

An artist friend suggested we work together to make centerpieces for tables at a celebration for our senior pastor, who is a certified yoga instructor. It would be a minimalist portrayal of a person in a seated yoga pose. She provided the profile as a single pen stroke. 

I cleaned up the scanned image and made it more solid black, then imported it as a SVG file into Fusion 360. I extruded it and figured out how large I could make it and still fit into the portion of my print bed that heats well. 

I found that some areas still did not stick well, so I added custom rafts. That helped... then I looked back at my records and found that my temperatures were quite a bit lower than I had used on that filament before. So I brought up the temperature and it stuck even better.

The bottom curves of the design included some flat areas so it would be relatively stable, but it was still easy to knock over. So I designed a round base with tabs that the upright part would snap into with a friction fit. 

That took a little fiddling to get the dimensions right, but I used an old trick of just printing the relevant sample, to save time and plastic.

Here is the finished print. I made 12 sets.

Photo by Chie Chap

And here is the finished centerpiece, with a mandala of leaves and stones on a fiberboard base. They were a big hit at the celebration!

Camera battery door - smallest part ever!

My camera has a battery door which is held closed by a little plastic lever, and it broke. I figured if the part was even available from Olympus, it would cost $10 plus shipping and would take a week or so to get here. Thingiverse to the rescue! Someone else had already designed the part and shared it on line. That's great, because some aspects of it are really small and I wasn't looking forward to designing it from scratch.

A sample part printed with a 0.25mm nozzle came out rather lumpy, so I wanted to use my smallest nozzle, 0.15mm. I've used it before, but it's so small it can be finicky. My previous project was printed in Nylon, which takes a lot of heat... and can be hard to clean out of the hotend. Sure enough, it caused the worst clogs I've ever seen. I could sometimes get some cleaning filament through, but it would repeatedly gum up again. The 0.25 nozzle was clogged and I had to use a heat gun and some very small cleaning wires to get it clear. Then the "heat break" portion of the hotend was also clogged. I had to use a drill bit and some careful hammer taps to get it cleared. 

I finally figured out that the hotend was not getting as hot as it used to, barely reaching the temperature needed to melt the Nylon. So there was not enough heat to permeate the whole hotend and nozzle, which explains why I could not get it cleaned out well. Fortunately I also have some 0.15mm cleaning wires, which are really hard to insert. I finally got it working well enough to get residual PLA out of the 0.15 nozzle and do some test prints.

This is a very small part:

Simplfy3D calculated that it used 0.19 of a gram of plastic.

The good news is that it fit and worked perfectly on the camera:

While I had the printer loaded up I printed a half-dozen more units and offered them to people in a couple of my online Olympus-related photography groups. At only 0.19 gram, I can mail two of them in an envelope with one stamp!

Afterward I ordered a new heater element from partsbuilt.com and installed it. The hotend now heats up at least 50% faster and can go well beyond the required heat for Nylon.

Closet Door Spacers / Guides

A friend was painting and recarpeting some bedrooms, and each room had the same style of sliding closet doors. He found that the plastic spacers or guides on the top of the doors had deteriorated and needed to be replaced. Do you know how many different manufacturers there are for home products? Lots! Do you know how many of them are still in business and supplying spare parts? Almost none! The guy at the hardware store just shook his head.

This is the same friend who specified the custom electrical box last year, so he thought Aha! Roger could make them. In fact, this is exactly the kind of project that got me interested in 3D printing in the first place: making irreplaceable parts. He's an engineer, so he carefully measured the old parts and gave me a detailed drawing. 

These were quite little, just over an inch in the biggest dimension. I put chamfers on all the corners so they would insert easily into the extruded aluminum frames. This view is upside-down: the square part is the "guide" which extends beyond the aluminum frame and keeps it from rattling back and forth.

I decided to print them in Taulman Bridge Nylon, because it is tough (resisting wear) and relatively low friction for moving parts.

I printed about three cycles of samples, refining the width of the insert part and the guide part. 

He needed 12 parts: 2 ends x 2 doors x 3 rooms. As with the previous project, I used Simplify3D's Sequential Print to produce several units per print job. Because the Nylon requires high heat I avoided the cooler areas of my heated bed.

Simplest design ever - mass produced!

I was approached by the head custodian at our church about 3D printing some parts. On the back of every pew there are several wooden holders with room for books, papers, pencils, and holes to receive 4 empty communion cups. You know those little glass or plastic cups? Each of the 4 cup holes has - or had - a plastic insert. I think the main purpose is to soften the noise of the cup being set down, and maybe prevent the glass (in the old days) from being scratched by the wood? Whatever, the plastic had deteriorated over the years and many of the inserts had broken and been discarded.

Simplest design ever! It's just a cylinder about 3/4 inch high, with a flange on top. I printed a few samples, varying the cylinder outside diameter by a millimeter. We tested them for fit and picked the right size. The holes in the wood were quite consistent.

I needed to print about 200 units. Simplify3D has a feature which can print multiple units in order, rather than printing all the units at one time, one layer at a time. This eliminates the stringing that would occur if the head repeatedly moved from part to part. You have to create a "Process" for each unit you want to print, then select them all to be printed, then choose Sequential Printing. You need to space the parts out enough that the components of the printer's hotend will not hit any previously printed units. In this case the parts are not very tall, so it is a pretty easy layout. I was able to print 16 units per print job.

I had some brown PLA on hand which blended perfectly with the wood color. Each job took just under 3 hours. They all printed very cleanly and needed no post-processing. I delivered them over a couple of weeks and the whole set cost about $12.