PRINTING

Many years ago I made one of these out of wood. This is the 21st century version!

Found design online, can be adjusted to desired size. I've printed several of these now, and they're great for storing collected seeds from the garden, with a tiny sachet of silica gel granules to keep the seeds dry, and just write the plant name on the lid.

Something changed in the recipe for soap and it keeps cracking. Normal soap dishes don't seem to help. So I designed this one for maximum air circulation!

Found this online and printed it for Halloween .

Cute spider in the style of the comic artist Ibanez. Very tricky to print the web, the minor lines are just 0.2mm thick and 0.4mm wide.

 For when you need to hook something to a tree, like a shed door.

The amusing thing about 3D design is that if you want to make something with a hole in, you don't have to design the solid bit first, you can design the hole first if you like. They can be made any shape you like. One of these is reasonably useful, the other somewhat less so :o)

Not quite as functional as I thought it would be when I downloaded the model file. Still does the job though. 

Surprisingly effective for lightweight clamping, despite being made of plastic. Won't hold down a workpiece for sawing though...

Yeah you can buy these for a few quid online, but why do that when for a few pence you can print one? Fixed my gardening trousers when the old clip fell apart.

My Toyota came with a really crude plastic screw-nut-thingy to hold the battery cover on. Broke the first time it had to be taken off to change the battery. So rather than buy the only one I could find online for £10-odd and end up with another instantly-breakable one, I designed a far better one from scratch and printed it for a few pence. It fits perfectly :o)

Anyone wanting to do similarly for a car that has the same duff nut-doodah, the model is here...

https://www.printables.com/model/583141-wingnut-for-battery-compartment-cover-for-toyota-a

That's the full link, even though it looks like it's missing a bit at the end.

Silhouette image of a hedgehog, printed about 1mm thick with a spike on the bottom so it can be poked into the ground to hold it up, and then painted and varnished.

Fingernail saver for tough shells!

This cheeky little robin is made in sections and assembled, as it would be unfeasible to use a domestic grade 3D printer that can only print one colour at a time. Doing a 1-piece would require hundreds of colour changes and take forever and waste huge quantities of filament.

A really cool gonk. Not my design, but the original was a single mesh image which had to be carved up into sections for the 3 colours and printed separately and then glued together. Took hours to work out the process for carving it up, but then it printed nicely so it was worth it.

FINALLY got the darts clutter under control with a modular stand that is wide enough to hold darts without crushing the flights, and tidy enough to take little space on a shelf. Each coloured section pops out holding its set of darts.

Another dragonfly design for the garden!

The original pattern was about 5 times the size of this, but I wanted to make a tiny one so I unbiggened it :o)

This was printed flat, and was SUPPOSED to curl up on heating in the oven as stresses introduced during printing get released when the material softens. Nope, didn't happen, so I had to use a hot air gun on each individual petal and bend it by hand. That's a lot of work, making this firmly a one-off model !

Nobody wants damp nuts :o)

A simple single-line-thick screw-together pot with slots that allow air to circulate but don't allow the silica beads to escape. These are home-roasted Kentish Cobnuts which are expensive and a lot of work to get to this stage of deep brown roast, they have a really rich taste and are only available for a few weeks a year, so we have to keep them crisp and dry and try not to eat them all at once. The silica is the non-toxic orange colour-changing type which can be tipped out onto a tray and dried out in the oven to recharge it, and then put back in the pot. Easier to see when they need recharging, compared with the sachets you can buy, I get the silica in bulk which is also packed into bigger pots for keeping my 3D filaments dry.

To send those wretched spiders running! Spiders don't like the smell of conkers, so this jar is 50% nothing and 50% jar, lots of air circulation for maximum spider annoyance and minimum aesthetic intrusion :o)

Similar devices are available for about 20 quid but why not make your own? 

I didn't do the original design work, but I did have to extensively redesign it to fit the junk I had lying around in the garage, avoiding spending any money on it! 

Push down over a weed (we have umpteen dandelions to remove and they're a real pain), twist, lift out the little plug of soil with the roots included. If the root is off-centre it can snap off, but then it's in a hole and only held in by a few remaining root fibres so it tends to lift out easily with fingers. Fill the neat hole with some sand/soil/compost and a pinch of grass seed near the top, job done. So much easier than digging, and far less damage to the lawn.

Normally in 3D printing, if you print something without any support you just end up with a load of spaghetti. I didn't guess there would ever be any application for that, unless you actually want a bowl of inedible spaghetti for some reason, hahaha! And then I found this model, the whole idea of which is to allow the printer to make big loops of filament in mid-air and have them land randomly on the previous layer. The effect is pretty cool.

Ok, you're right, I didn't print that on a 3D printer. It's still technically 3D Additive Manufacturing though because I made it by adding bits of wood together until it was the shape I wanted it :o)  It's just a decorative "beehive" to house some bamboo cane sections and pine cones and a little flowerpot to act as sleeping/breeding places for garden bugs.