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!