Posts tagged: 3d-printing Archive

It Kept Printing Sideways

2026-08-08T17:41:58Z

After a particularly tall print vibrations had moved my ams under the gantry of my bambu a1 so when it started its next print, it lifted it up, its safe, no printer was harmed, but this was a close call.

Portajohn3 Keyboard Plate

2026-01-01T17:18:39Z

A black keyboard plate with multiple switch sockets, awaiting switches and PCB.

Custom Keyboard Keycaps and 3D Printer

2025-12-29T22:16:37Z

Portajohn3 getting printed on a bambu lab A1 printer

The 3D Printed Ball Vise Every Creative Should Own - YouTube

2025-12-06T21:22:45Z

This ball vise Idea is incredible and I want one. Its a heavy workholding unit that can accept a variety of tools and manipulate things to a lot of angles while working on them. This looks really good for painting miniatures soldering or generally working on small 3d printed parts that I do.

My First 3d Printer

2025-11-12T09:04:00Z

When we got our ender 3 my son was 11. We assembled the day it came in and started the test print that came on the card. We watched as it painstakingly took hours to print the small sample. Already past his bed time, he was there to pull it off the bed immediately.

He woke me up at 5 am to tell me he found an stl online, installed the slicer software, set it up for our printer, sliced his model, got the gcode on the sd card, to the printer and had it running already while I was sleeping.

We had never once talked about 3d printing to this level, this was all him doing the research on his own. Having that interest that turns into an itch that you can’t shake, you must read, learn, and try until you figure it out.

3d-Printed Corner Clamp

2025-11-11T21:13:07Z

Getting ready to batch out 18 apple boxes for the local theater. Need to step up my woodworking tool game here quick on a low budget. Whipped this up up and built the prototype box , went really well. We have 4 in the arsenal now, might do 4 more if we need more assembly capacity. Pretty proud of the first 3d printed thread project here. The design for good 3d prints can be quite different with its anisotropic strength and hollow sections being nearly weightless when compared to traditional manufacturing methods. Its so fun to be able to do it for almost no cost right in my home office.

3d-printed corner clamp printed in black pla.

Isometric view of my corner clamp v1 that supports up to 3/4" sheets and includes slots for dowell points on 3/4" and 1/2" material.

3d Printing Dovetails Experiment

2025-10-12T20:34:35Z

I hit an issue with 3d printing oversized parts that I have not hit before. I’m working on some jigs for an upcoming woodworking project that will involve a lot of repetition. We want to utilize some dowel joinery and jigs for consistency. These parts will be up to 20in in length this is much larger than my print bed.

I’ve fit things together before #

Here’s where I went wrong, I wasn’t really thinking through my previous applications. They’ve all been slip fit, primarily print in place joints that need to move. My go to offset for print in place on my printer is 0.2mm, sometimes 0.1mm depending on the scale.

knife sharpener double hinge first try

A live hinged [[ knife-sharpener-double-hinge-first-try ]].

And in the hinges of [[ a-box-of-caps-and-a-macropad ]].

Experimenting for feel #

Fitment like this is a lot dependent on the tolerences of your printer and the feel you are going for. I went to school as a mechanical engineer and theres a lot of science behind press fit joints, that’s not happening in my house on my desktop printer. Most of us don’t have that kind of ability to gauge our outputs so I’m doing like a cook in the kitchen and going for feel.

Here are all of the experiements lined up.

Fillets #

I again, I feel like I should have known better. 3d printers generally have 0.4mm nozzles, common sizes you can get 0.2mm, 0.4mm, 0.6mm, and 0.8mm. This leaves us with the sharpest corner we can do at 0.2mm.

Diagram courtesy of gpt-5.

Potentially overkill #

In order to make sure that the flat edges of the dovetails are what are making contact and not corners binding I made the inside fillet 0.6mm and the outside 0.4mm. This 0.4mm radius (0.8mm diameter) is double my nozzle size, and will cause the printer to follow a smooth curve rather than start and stop and potentially overflow a bit. This difference in fillet size will also leave a little room for error and allow the important flat faces to mate together.

Here are the test results after filleting the edges of the dovetails to compensate for printer errors.

Fillets

Before Fillets

After Fillets

TLDR What works for me #

After all of this, turns out that common sense kinda just works here, 0mm offset works really well on my printer, and leaving room in the corners to keep them from binding up helps a bit, but is probably unnecessary.

0mm offset
0.6mm inside fillet
0.4mm outside fillet

This printed design holds a steel tube where the tube goes. #o...

2025-09-27T07:16:06Z

This is a super cool movement, I like the idea of giving access to composable components like we have in open source. You want to build a website you have a bunch of options from raw dogging assembly all the way up to predefined templates that just need your content. Idk if the analogy is perfect but there are aspects of it that work. I see where right now we are somewhere in raw dogging c or python. We have cheap nuts and bolts and some low level things, but once someone needs some coupler like this it’s dropping down to drawing it by hand.

Print over Part - YouTube

2025-09-26T19:15:24Z

Wow, I’ve never seen or thought of multi setup parts this is very thought provoking, not sure how useful it is as we have good adhesives and stuff for printed parts. I definitely want to try this though

Idea to Product in Seconds #PortalPrints - YouTube

2025-09-16T06:43:59Z

3d-printing is so freaking cool. I love the idea that someone could get a hyperspecific tool to their needs for super cheap. Whether it works permanently or to try out one that you want to spend thousands of dollars on to have well done from some high end materials this is a great application.

store

2025-09-10T20:38:00Z

I’ve been 3d printing for years, and create a lot of my own designs. Many of them are hyper specific to me, but for the ones that I think others might find useful I will be putting up here for sale, you can buy prints that will show up to your door in a few days. I’m leaning on the slant3d print farm so this depends on your proximity to them. The prints are typically black petg, if you would like a different color reach out to me and I will see what other options we have, or for an additional fee I can print it myself and ship out special colors.

These are all designs that I made and actually use myself, they bring me joy knowing that I made just the thing that I wanted to exist and if you buy something I hope that it brings you this joy as well.

Skateboard Wall Mount #

I’ve used these skateboard wall mounts for years, I have 5 in my office featuring new decks in the queue, and probably 10 in the garage to display used decks, and fully assembled boards for me and my kids. I use these for both regular popscicle boards and longboards, but if you are putting up a thicker longboard go with the thicker size.

Mic stand Clips #

These clips will hold your cables on your mic stand nicely and look nice while doing it. I’ve got them on both of my mic stands, there are two versions, one for a smaller stand with usb cable, and one for a larger stand with an xlr cable make sure you measure your mic stand before buying.

13mm stand | 6mm xlr cable

10mm stand | 4mm usb

Cat Door #

In our house we have a cat liter box in the basement, so we need to leave the door open for our cat. But if our dog goes down there he seems to only cause trouble. So I modeled this door prop to leave the door just enough open for the cat, but keep the dog out.

cat door

Kicker Ramp #

kicker ramp

manny pad

Plastic rollers instead of bearings. Little step forward with ...

2025-08-29T18:31:40Z

This is a really uniquely designed print in place bb launcher. I’ve never seen bb’s on a zip tie like that, they look smooth and molded. Interesting to hear about the design process.

Custom Keyboard Keycaps

2025-05-11T11:39:40Z

A fresh print of caps and a 2x2 test board.

3D Printable Power Brick Bracket Designer

2025-05-01T19:17:43Z

3D Printable Power Brick Bracket Designer

Generate custom 3D printable power brick brackets for your devices. Design and export your own mounting solutions.

Bracket Engineer · bracket.engineer

This is madness that Wes Bos made this with manifold.js and no openscad! Yes, I have these stupid brackets everywhere, yes, I hand model my own brackets. No I don’t do it enough. I don’t like that these model generators like openscad cannot make fillets and chamfers, but I appreciate the heck out of the speed and automation you can make iterations of things.

Link to the promo video. https://bsky.app/profile/wesbos.com/post/3lo4h7unk6s2i

True Non-Planar Slicing is Here - YouTube

2025-04-19T20:39:34Z

This is a wild concept for a slicer, essentially he didn’t even make a slicer just a crazy pre-process and post prossess to cura slicer, deforming the part until it doesn’t have any overhangs, creating a normal planar slice, then undeforming the output from cura. He also mentions that the rapid moved needed modified as well. I’m assuming this is because they are generally long distances and not short, without breaking these long lines up we would still end up wtih a straight line after deform.

Mantis Clamp by zuberio | Download free STL model | Printables...

2025-02-19T04:24:06Z

External Link

printables.com

Zuberios Mantic clamp, would ya look at it. This thing looks like a handy tool for soldering. Excited to give it a try.

The 3D Printed Mantis Clamp! #3dprinting #shorts #diy - YouTube

2025-02-19T04:22:54Z

Damn this looks good, I’ve been casually keeping my eye out for something like this for quite awhile, I think this will come in handy for keeb builds. Printing one out as I post this, damn I love 3d-printing.

Custom Gridfinity Bins For ANYTHING! - YouTube

2024-12-27T01:02:29Z

This tip of using tinkercad to do boolean operations on an stl of a solid gridfinity bin and an outline is absolute fire 🔥🔥🔥. This feels like a relatively simple operation, but to do it to a generated stl proves hard to do in most modeling software, at least harder than it needs to be. Somehow tinkercad got it right and made it a very basic operation to do.

It took me a minute to find the Merge button that Uncle Jessy mentioned, they call it a group in TinkerCAD.

My Firs Keycaps with Symbols

2024-11-25T08:03:39Z

Finally got my first set of keycaps with letters! These low-profile keys look perfect for customizing my keyboard setup.

First Self-Designed Keycaps and Symbols

2024-11-25T06:59:13Z

These are more keycaps from my very first set that I designed and printed myself. Some of the symbols are a little wonky, and a few were too thin to print cleanly.

My First Printed Keycaps Are Here

2024-11-25T06:57:42Z

Completing my first batch of keycaps designed and printed entirely by myself on the Bambu Lab A1.

How to make a good first impression in business #dewalt #tools...

2024-11-25T02:39:24Z

Dang, love this guys branding. Hooks to get stuff offDaBench, what a freaking cool name.

Rugged Storage Box, Parametric and Customizable by bulbasaur0 ...

2024-11-07T02:58:54Z

External Link

printables.com

Non Gridfinity Rugged boxes

Gridfinity Rugged Storage Box, Parametric and Customizable by ...

2024-11-07T02:33:58Z

External Link

printables.com

gridfinity rugged box openscad

Gridfinity Generator

2024-11-04T22:29:57Z

Gridfinity Generator

gridfinity.perplexinglabs.com

Gridfinity generator uses open scad, so you can make rugged boxes, bins and base plates with form input. not fully custom fit to things, but you can custom size square bins, hole cut out sides and all. From what I can tell, no bento box either. so as long as what you are looking for is square this generator has you pretty well covered. I’m definitely using this for simple bins and rugged boxes.

ticklemykeys on X: "Porta john got some pink caps https://t.co...

2024-10-27T07:20:51Z

X on X

X (formerly Twitter) · x.com

Loving this 6 pink with blueforward multicolor combo the porta john has going right now. Also my son printed me a cute black pumpkin.

Modular Input Device on Wood

2024-09-30T08:13:30Z

Here you can see quite the size difference between the original portajohn1 and the low profile portajohn2.

NOT - LTT Screwdriver - Fancy by Erer2001 | Download free STL ...

2024-08-27T07:13:03Z

External Link

printables.com

Someone has created a knock off of the ltt screwdriver and made it printable, and it works really well. I have one printed with 6 different bitholders. I popped some labels on them in bambu studio as I printed to mark them for metric/inch and so on.

I’ve had mine for about a year now, and I use it quite often. I used to be a dedicated screwdriver kind of guy, but as life has changed I’m not working out of a shop with tools at reach as much, I’m grabbing a couple of items and heading to a job in the house or a neighbors house. It’s not 30s to grab just the right dedicated screwdriver anymore. Also having some setup with hex and torx is a game changer. It’s also super handy that you can just pop the bits right into a drill or impact.

Highly recommended print. Sorry for not buying the real deal Linux, I got kids to feed here. I owe you a t-shirt order or something.

New-caps-for-porta-john

2024-08-05T19:06:00Z

Today I dropped some new caps in the porta-john. I need to do a bunch of posts on zmk and my journey building the porta-john, I’ve been rocking it for at least two weeks now pretty solid and I am absolutely loving it. More on that later.

KLP-Lame-Keycaps #

The model of the caps are KLP-Lame by braindefender , they are super rounded and smooth. They look really good on camera and feel good to the finders.

I printed these at home on my ender3 s1 pro with a black and purple silk filliment. I printed all 42 at once using a Printing 42 keys at once technique. They do have just a bit of a rough texture that you can feel on your figertips. I printed these on super quality .12mm layer height, while my last set was printed on draft quality .32mm layer height. They look crazy different in print quality with the lines of the new caps barely showing, the feel isn’t nearly as drastic.

The Result #

Check out the final shots as I set up the porta-john with these sweet caps.

And here they are all set up.

Full Disclosure #

I am building out a keyboard business, so if you are interested in getting some of these caps for yourself or an entire board custom made to your liking hit me up. If you’re not quite ready, I would be stoked if you keep in touch by sigining up for the email newsletter https://ticklemykeys.com.

Printing 42 keys at once

2024-08-03T09:54:00Z

I’m working on creating some gcode to create a whole set of key caps in one print, it is getting tedious to print them one at a time, and my past experience with my printer proves that printing a bunch of separate pieces increases the chances of failure. I don’t want to end up with 42 keys that are half done and a ball of filament.

figuring out the coordinates #

To figure out the coordinates I printed one key cap, and manually jogged the printer in position to knock off the cap, then sweep it out of the way.

print head in position to knock

Position before the knock

Position after the sweep

gcode #

I opened the gcode split it into start.gcode, end.gcode, and part.gcode.

start.gcode #

;FLAVOR:Marlin
;TIME:1488
;Filament used: 0.265511m
;Layer height: 0.12
;MINX:105.708
;MINY:101.231
;MINZ:0.12
;MAXX:113.512
;MAXY:118.776
;MAXZ:17.04
;TARGET_MACHINE.NAME:Creality Ender-3 S1 Pro
;Generated with Cura_SteamEngine 5.8.0
M82 ;absolute extrusion mode
; Ender 3 S1 Pro Start G-code
; M413 S0 ; Disable power loss recovery
G92 E0 ; Reset Extruder

; Prep surfaces before auto home for better accuracy
M140 S60
M104 S200

G28 ; Home all axes
G1 Z10.0 F3000 ; Move Z Axis up little to prevent scratching of Heat Bed
G1 X0 Y0

M190 S60
M109 S200

M82 ;absolute extrusion mode
; Ender 3 S1 Pro Start G-code
; M413 S0 ; Disable power loss recovery
G92 E0 ; Reset Extruder

; Prep surfaces before auto home for better accuracy
M140 S60
M104 S200

G28 ; Home all axes
G1 Z10.0 F3000 ; Move Z Axis up little to prevent scratching of Heat Bed
G1 X0 Y0

M190 S60
M109 S200

G1 X0.1 Y20 Z0.3 F5000.0 ; Move to start position
G1 X0.1 Y200.0 Z0.3 F1500.0 E15 ; Draw the first line
G1 X0.4 Y200.0 Z0.3 F5000.0 ; Move to side a little
G1 X0.4 Y20 Z0.3 F1500.0 E30 ; Draw the second line

end.gcode #

M140 S0 ; Turn off bed
M107 ; Turn off fan
G91 ;Relative positioning
G1 E-2 F2700 ;Retract a bit
G1 E-2 Z0.2 F2400 ;Retract and raise Z
G1 X5 Y5 F3000 ;Wipe out
G1 Z10 ;Raise Z more
G90 ;Absolute positioning

G1 X0 Y220 ;Present print
M106 S0 ;Turn-off fan
M104 S0 ;Turn-off hotend
M140 S0 ;Turn-off bed

M84 X Y E ;Disable all steppers but Z

M82 ;absolute extrusion mode
M104 S0
;End of Gcode
;SETTING_3 {"global_quality": "[general]\\nversion = 4\\nname = Super Quality #2
;SETTING_3 \\ndefinition = creality_ender3s1pro\\n\\n[metadata]\\ntype = quality
;SETTING_3 _changes\\nquality_type = super\\nsetting_version = 23\\n\\n[values]\
;SETTING_3 \nadhesion_type = none\\nsupport_type = buildplate\\n\\n", "extruder_
;SETTING_3 quality": ["[general]\\nversion = 4\\nname = Super Quality #2\\ndefin
;SETTING_3 ition = creality_ender3s1pro\\n\\n[metadata]\\ntype = quality_changes
;SETTING_3 \\nquality_type = super\\nsetting_version = 23\\nposition = 0\\n\\n[v
;SETTING_3 alues]\\nbrim_gap = 0.1\\nspeed_print = 120\\nsupport_angle = 35\\nz_
;SETTING_3 seam_corner = z_seam_corner_inner\\nz_seam_position = right\\n\\n"]}

part.gcode #

Now part.gcode is the rest of the gcode, and is 22k lines long, I’ll spare putting that in this post.

Writing the knock and sweep #

Now that I have the coordinates, and my gcode split up, I am going to write the code for the knock and sweep by hand, and just add this to the end of part.gcode.

; KNOCK AND SWEEP
G0 X80 Y140 ; move to knock position
G0 Z2 ; lower z to knock
G0 X140 ; knock
G0 Y40 ; sweep

A python script to make multiples #

Now I wrote this python script to generate a gcode file to print n number of caps

from pathlib import Path
import sys

n = int(sys.argv[1])
print("printing " + str(n) + " times")


start = Path("start.gcode").read_text()
end = Path("end.gcode").read_text()
part = Path("part.gcode").read_text()

full = start + part * n + end
Path("kp-lame-normal-" + str(n) + ".gcode").write_text(full)

python render.py 42

Results #

The final result here is me printing out 42 new caps in this beautiful black and purple silk fillament.

knock-and-sweep.mp4

I Invented Airless Cornhole Bags - YouTube

2024-08-01T17:34:12Z

This is such a cool 3d printed cornhole game.

The Portajohn Monoblock Keyboard Design

2024-07-15T16:36:57Z

Check out the Portajohn! This custom 42-key monoblock was my first full keyboard build, designed to plop on a laptop, while still exposing the trackpad and able to flip over and toss in a backpack.

Laying some wire in PortaJohn 1

2024-07-13T11:03:27Z

Close-up view of a barebones custom mechanical keyboard plate and PCB.

Laying down the first test print of a portajohn on a laptop

2024-07-13T10:54:02Z

A setup featuring an open laptop running Ubuntu next to a detached, custom mechanical keyboard.

Waylon Walker - handwired macropads on X: "First bit of hand w...

2024-07-01T07:02:31Z

waylon walker (@_WaylonWalker) on X

First bit of hand written gcode in 12 years let's go!

X (formerly Twitter) · x.com

Not gonna lie, kinda pumped about this one. I manually did one, jotted down the coordinates, opened the gcode in vim, added markers between setup/teardown and print. then added the wipe, the copy pasted the print+wipe section a bunch of times.

My printer tends to run a bit better on single prints than printing a dozen at once as it has less issues with retract start and stop.

STLGears.com | The Free STL Gear Designer

2024-05-26T05:04:56Z

STLGears.com

The Free STL Gear Designer For 3D Printing

stlgears.com

This is a pretty nice gear generator. I printed a few gears today and it worked great so far.

New Black Corne with purple glow

2021-06-23T13:04:53Z

These kaihl browns, loving them. This is going to be a trip to get used to, I thought typing on a column stagger layout would be hard to get used to, nope, its the symbols, that 4th layer is hard to get rid of.