Initial 3D Printing Adventures
Our family has been enjoying 3D printing as a 2025 adventure, which has been fun. I took our older kids to a 3D printing conference (https://3dprintopia.com/), after a friend mentioned it (he runs HueForge). Our older kids were excited to see the creations people made. Santa generously brought our family a Bambu 3D printer this past year (I'm a fan of Wirecutter reviews, and Santa seemed to follow their recommendation).
The Bambu system makes it easy to start in this world, compared to how complex 3D printing used to be -- you can use an app on your phone to pick an existing 3D model from MakerWorld, select your color(s), and out it comes.
Investing in an Automatic Material System (AMS) lets you queue up multiple colors, which is great for convenience (so you don't have to change the colors each time), and offers the ability to do multi-color prints which is a great.
When you first get it setup, it's very meta to find that for the scraper you need, it comes with a blade and screws, and you 3D print the handle. And the back of the printer ejects plastic it doesn't need, and if you don't want it to fall on the table behind the printer, you print your own "poop chute bin."
Some fun/useful prints we've done so far:
- Eternity Labs Stacking Storage Basket 140x200mm
- Roz the Robot ("Wild Robot" is a great kids book series)
- Fidget spinner
- Roses with stems
- Pirate ship
- Dachshund
- Lego baseplate (so my son could attach some legos to the side of one of his bookshelves)
- Piano music box (they sell this as a kit, that has the music box internals, and you print the rest of it)
- Apple Watch Charging Stand
- Tiny Fire Truck in an Egg
- T-Rex Pencil Holder
- We lost the spool for one of our scotch tape dispensers, so we printed this Scotch Tape Spool Replacement
- My son and I printed a clock, using glow-in-the-dark plastic, using this BambuLab Clock design, and then put a working quartz clock on the back to power the hands
- A few days ago, a friend asked if I could print him a Hidden Touch ID for Apple Magic Trackpad for his Mac, which cost about 92 cents in plastic to print off for him (it's around 2 cents per gram of plastic)
Some upcoming projects I'm excited to play with include:
- One of our dishwasher separators broke, and I'm excited I can print my own one of these days: Bosch dishwasher separator.
- The new CyberBrick system looks interesting for kids to play with, while learning some programming skills.
- Printing some dollhouse furniture for my daughters
- Trying to print some gliders (there is a lightweight plastic used for flying creations)
- Some tool organizers for my Ryobi stuff
- Some Lego and/or Star Wars light switch/outlet covers
It's been fun to play, and I'm excited as our kids get a little older to encourage them to try to design their own 3D models to print.
