3D printing

In September 2019 we bought a Prusa i3 MK3S 3D printer. Over several weekends, my 10-year-old son assembled most of it himself, with my supervision. In November 2019 we got the MMU2S multi-material upgrade but didn't get around to assembling that until February 2020, again over a few weekends.

Due to space constraints on the desk where the printer sits, we did not build the filament buffer but instead built auto-rewinders dryboxes as can be seen in the picture above. The designs are publicly available, in the repository linked below.

I started out designing things in Sketchup back when the desktop application was free, then moved to Tinkercad (which my son still uses), and worked with FreeCAD for a while. I still use Tinkercad on occasion, but now I design almost everything using OpenSCAD.

OpenSCAD seems daunting at first because you design things via a programming language and a GUI viewer instead of a full GUI experience, but now I find it easier to create things in OpenSCAD than any other 3D design software.

Articles

My designs

My username is Anachronist on Printables and Amatulic on Thingiverse. I use Printables as my main repository with Thingiverse as a backup.

Click here to see my designs.

All of my designs come with the OpenSCAD source code for anyone to modify (except for my drill bit and King Kamehameha spear head, which come with Tinkercad models).

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