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3D printing, quite useful sometimes

I noticed that whenever anyone I knew bought themselves a 3D printer they became almost evangelistic about things.

This seemed rather odd. People don't start preaching the virtues and joys of owning an electric drill, a welder, a chainsaw or any other kind of tool -- so why are 3D printer owners so obsessed with their new purchase?

One only has to spend a few minutes on 3D design repository websites such as Thingiverse or Printables to realise that much of what's being 3D printed is pretty lame and seems to serve no real purpose except to waste plastic.

Okay, that might be something of an unfair statement -- let's just say that most 3D printed designs are incredibly niche in their nature.

So I've been using my 3D printer for several months now, have I become obsessed?

Nope.

I don't have a 3D printed keychain, my house isn't filled with 3D printed vases, sculptures or other stuff.

The rolls of filament I purchased are still pretty full and although I do have a box to hold scraps of material and prints that weren't quite right, it's only half full.

My room isn't constantly filled with the whirring and buzzing of stepper motors and I do have to give my printer a light dust before I use it because it's probably been days since it was last used.

For me, the 3D printer is just a tool, there must be something wrong with me.

So what have I made with this amazing device?

I'd have to say that the thing which has been most useful are the new handgrips I printed for my exercise frame. This is the frame I use to do pull-ups and dips as part of my regular exercise regime.

It's a very cheap frame from Mighty Ape and although it serves the purpose, it has quite small diameter tubing which means it hurts your hands. This small diameter tubing means that your bodyweight is very concentrated on just a small area of your fingers or hands when it's being used. "Uncomfortable" would be an understatement.

The discomfort was tollerable when I was only using my bodyweight but as I've been increasingly adding weight to a backpack so as to increase the resistance involved, those tubes really dig into your hands and the super-thin hard plastic grips that come as standard do not help at all.

I'd tried using pool noodles slipped over the pipe so as to provide some cushioning and increase the diameter but that was too soft and compressed to nothing when a decent weight was added. About the best solution was to use some small handtowels wrapped around and taped -- but these inevitable worked loose and my wife was asking awkward questions such as "have you seen my hand towels?" so this was to be a temporary fix at best.

Today however, I have a very comfortable set of 44mm diameter soft-plastic grips that I designed and printed myself using TPU filament on the 3D printer.

After experimenting a little with the percentage of in-fill (ie: the ratio of plastic to free-space in the centre of the print) I now have a pair of luxuriously comfortable grips that make exercising a joy rather than the pain it used to be.

The other spectacularly useful thing I've made is a mount for an old action camera. This mount also includes an 18650 lithium-ion battery and I made it primarily because I was unable to buy a replacement battery for that camera. The standard square form-factor batteries were discontinued years ago and the one I have no longer takes or holds a charge.

Now I have 3000mAH capacity (versus the 1000mAH of the original) plus a tripod mount and in the next itteration I'll also be adding a little fitting to reduce wind-noise on the microphone. Without this nifty little 3D print I'd have had to thrown away the equivalent of a GoPro simply for lack of a new battery.

A couple of weeks ago I also designed and made the plastic for a 6-cell lithium-ion battery pack that goes on a medium-sized quadcopter. Normally I just hotglue the cells together and wrap them in tape but that looks pretty "bodge" so I figured I'd print something up. The result is *very* nice and only a few grams heavier than the glue and tape option.

Almost everything I print is from my own design because it is made for a specific need that I (and probably only I) have. This is the real strength of 3D printing, the ability to create exactly what YOU need as and when you need it.

However, most people don't have a lot of such "needs" and prefer to simply download and print other people's designs -- which is why their homes are filled with absolutely unnecessary bits of 3D-printed junk :-)

If any readers have 3D printers I'd love to hear what camp you fall into. Are you an "enthusiast" who is always looking for something new to print -- or are you just a guy (like me) who finds the 3D printer to be an occasionally useful tool for solving a problem.

Carpe Diem folks!

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