Campbell Shane brings us a saurian with arguably the best line in all of Firefly, which is saying a lot.  It might print better with a few support struts, but I think they’d be easy to merge in in OpenSCAD.  Anyone up to the challenge?

The classic silly build project, the useless box is now printable!  This is arguably the simplest example of “Machine Will,” where a box with a lid seems to have a personality.  A bloody-minded personality to keep that switch OFF, thank you very much.

The curled switch part, and its interface to the switch on the bottom are very elegant.

This mask evokes a lot of solar imagery and kinda reminds me of that one Star Trek episode where Data was freaking out because some space temple had imprinted him with alien Aztec mythology.

That show got pretty weird in the last few seasons…

Now, you’d need what in the Seattle area we’d call “hella build area” to make a wearable mask, but maybe it wouldn’t be too extreme if you printed it upright and diagonally… well probably upside down really.  And with some support struts.  Printed smaller it’d always look pretty boss on your Data action figure…

Way back when home 3D printing was young(er), Adrian and crew did some forethought into drill holes that’d need to be printed horizontal while still obeying the 45-degree angle rule.  (At the time, the many experiments in bending or breaking this rule that would follow were unattainable, as RepRaps, MakerBots, and their kin had not been implemented yet.)  The solution: make the hole into a teardrop shape, so that plastic being built up on either side would not droop and clog the hole.

This technique worked, but it was later found that for small holes you can (usually) get away with completely cylindrical holes if you’re willing to run a bolt through them a few times first.

There also was a (somewhat ill-advised) tradition of building a shot glass as one’s first print and drinking to the new machine’s health.  Combining these two bits of living 3D printing history, we have Ron Aldrich’s very attractive teardrop shot glass, which he offers with a tip to use food grade urethane to make the glass usable.

As I said when I pointed out this design, it was made thoughtfully with no-support 3D printing in mind, and with some help and advice from the community.  For these reasons I was quite convinced I’d see it printed out, and fairly soon.  Turns out I was right.

I love seeing designs follow weird paths from draft to finish, and they do that all the time in this community.  Something that would have been unheard of in times past but which is getting fairly common is, someone designs something, but has no means to actually make it, but the design is attractive enough that someone feels compelled to make it.

Of course it doesn’t hurt if the person doing the print is really good at this sort of thing.

I mean, I really liked the wedge design from the beginning, but as the design gets worked over by the community, things are getting pared down, sleeked up, and re-routed over time.  This design has a GitHub page, which is perhaps appropriate– RepRaps in particular act a bit more like open source software projects than your typical awesome thing on Thingiverse…

The bar doesn’t stop going up on a site like this, and as you might have guessed, this is a render, not a finished print, and a lot of the fiddly bits look like they’d be a real challenge to get printed out, but something about the already-laid-out tray of parts tells me this creator has put a lot of thought into getting this thing printworthy.

I love the ridging in the texture on the model– kind of anticipates the final form…

Hey, keen!  Colorizing filament this way you’d be able to mix colors with sharpies and as the creator points out you could totally rework this to have, like, a ring of sharpies all bearing down from all angles.

Come to think of it, a few servos up there and some (probably very fiddly) software mojo and you could maybe even pull off color prints…

Well I do, and this one’s awesome.  Steven Conine made this awesome replica of his home, and the print came out super-great too!  The detail on here is really sharp, demonstrating how awesome home 3D printing is getting lately.

I wish I’d thought of it– and I really could have, at my old lab, we HAD a vice with a bad jaw.  Genius.  Heck, this one’s the add-0n for better grip of this old one– you could do up jaws that cradle anything perfectly.  Maybe not that much call for it but it just seems like the sort of thing that someday, somewhere someone will think, this would be so much simpler if the vice were molded around what it was holding…

And maybe the next morning it will be.