Goal Met: Design and Print 5 3D Print Projects

So yeah – I work in a 3D print lab with access to the latest cutting edge technology and I got a 3D printer for my house when I got the job to really deep dive into the technology. I spent months printing out other people’s projects from various maker sites but I really wanted to learn how to make my own cool stuff. The only issue was I haven’t touched a CAD tool in a very long time and when I fired up the most recent version of Fusion 360 I was at a total loss.

The first step was getting some CAD training – LinkedIn learning came in handy here as there was a really informative Fusion 360 class that explained everything I needed to know in just a few hours, so I set to work doing CAD development for 3D printing.

The first thing I did was create a little tombstone for an application that I supported for over a decade as it was finally retired and removed from production. I can’t say I was sorry to see it go (as the software was 10 years old and a giant pain to support) but a little token in my office seemed like an appropriate send off.

Next up was creating some holders for the kid’s craft carts as they were always losing the glue and scissors so I got to work measuring and creating a holder that could hang off the side of the cart (only I got the sizes all wrong and the first version was way too small) it’s a pretty niche product but filled a need so I was kind of proud of it

Then I created a few Christmas Ornaments – one to commemorate our trip to Disney, and one for my nephew’s first birthday. These came together pretty quick and using Bambu print’s keychain maker allowed me to turn JPG images into 3D print objects which came in super handy for this project.

My daughter came to me and complained that her new backpack didn’t have enough space for all her keychains (that’s a thing now, I guess) so I surprised her by making this nifty keychain extender that allowed her to add as many keychains as she wanted!

Finally I was working with my son on his pinecar derby car and we needed a place to hide the weights to make it more aerodynamic so I printed a ‘cockpit’ for his car that could glue the weights to and hide them. It was fun learning the shell command to hollow out a solid object – that’s going to come in useful I’m sure!

I really enjoyed this process and learning how to use CAD to design and print things. I’m looking around my house now for things that 3D printing can solve and as I build my skills I’m hoping I can tackle more complex projects but for now I’m pretty excited for the things I made so far (this was one of the hobbies that kinda got put on the back burner once I was done so make time for other goals, but I hope to revisit it frequently this coming year)