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Two of the common misconecptions I hear about 3D printing are; that it is only good for making useless trinkets, and that it’s inaccessible (expensive, takes up too much space, too difficult etc.). In reality, 3D printing can be used to quickly, easily and cheaply solve problems and/or make life easier. So I’d like to show a few of the useful things that I have printed that I use often around the house. Almost all of these things came from me having a problem, then designing and printing something to solve it.
My phones USB charging port no longer works. Instead of buying a new phone, I got a wireless charger. Everynight, I put my phone on the charger, check that it is charging, and go to bed. Sometimes, when I wake up, I find that my phone stopped charging shortly after I put it down because I didn’t have it correctly aligned on the charger. That’s quite annoying.
After quickly measuring the charger and my phone, I modeled up a bracket to hold them together in correct alignment. I printed it out and I haven’t woken up to a half charged phone since.
I wanted a pull up bar to get stronger for rock climbing. I got a wooden dowel from the local hardware store, then designed and printed a couple of brackets to attach it to my hangboard (finger training tool for rock climbers).
“Is it strong enough?”, I hear you asking. Yes, it can easily hold my weight plus an additional 30kg (and probably much more).
The wheels on the head of our vacuum cleaner broke. Finding spare parts is basically impossible. A quick measure up, 10 minutes of CAD work and an hour of printing later, I had replacements. I even printed little tires for them from a flexible material. Good as new.
I like to have a few tools on my desk for measuring and working on things. They used to sit all over my desk in a mess. Now they sit perfectly in a custom desk organiser. They’re easy to get at, I know exactly where to look to find them and they take up much less space.
A small part on my partner’s sewing machine broke. It’s old and finding a replacement part would be somewhere between annoying and impossible. It was easy to model up a new part and print it out. She’s very happy.
When returning home from overseas, I got my suitcase off the luggage carrasoule at the airport to find half of the wheels broken off. After a fruitless look around for replacements, I’ll let you guess what my solution was. As with the vacuum cleaner wheels I printed soft tires for them. I’ve used the suitcase since and it worked perfectly.
I have a roll of paper towels with my 3D printer. In an effort to declutter my workspace, I wanted to mount the paper towel roll on the under side of a shelf. This time, instead of modeling a part myself, I just went to Printables and looked for one someone had already made. I found one quickly, printed it out, screwed it to the shelf and it works perfectly.
Along with the paper towels, I have a few tools that I use often with my 3D printer. I wanted them out of the way too. I designed a little holder for them that attaches to the side of my printer enclosure, freeing up valuable bench space. It works really well and saves me the annoyance of struggling to find the sidecutters in the clutter.
Going with the theme of the last two, I wanted a bin that mounted to the underside of my shelf. I use it to get rid of support material, purge lines, skirts, brims etc. from printed parts. This bin is in two parts, one being the bin itself and the other being a dovetail holder that is screwed to the shelf. The bin just slides in and out, letting me take it out for emptying.
That’s all for now. Maybe that gave you an idea for a problem you could solve with 3D printing.
