But I did, because this one is really pretty.  A finial is basically anything you put on the top of a flagpole, steeple or other architectural structure to make it look neat.  This one would have been pretty attractive in opaque plastic, but in PLA with multiple colors of LED glowing through it, it’s pretty serious.

Now of course someone has to start putting this on top of other things, because that’d be sweet.

So leaving out the fact that a nested Reuleaux Triangle that you can fit in your pocket is something that just oozes cool and, were you to whip it out at a party (at least the kind I go to) have everyone instantly fascinated even if it weren’t something you downloaded and printed, mechanisms of this type particularly interest me because they natively react well to extruded plastic 3D printing.

Captive parts aren’t always possible in a project, when it works, it’s magic.

Design 3D surfaces by drawing bitmaps!  The script writes directly in GCode, the native language of 3D printers, so this is definitely a time to know your extruder behaviors.  Scripting directly in GCode has a lot of advantages, like simplicity, since you often can get away without really wrestling 3D geometry and mesh files.

You can also code in whatever language you like, as long as it can save to ASCII text files.  This code generator is written in Lua!

Bicycle shops are already places where a pretty dazzling array of mechanical engineering feats are accomplished (after all, a bicycle shop built the first airplane), and happily this tradition continues with a plethora of bicycle widgets from the classic to the cutting edge, and from straightforward keep-it-going fixes like this one to pure artistic expression, enabled by 3D printers.

(Little wonder also that a recent episode of MakerBot TV featured a whole-bike makeover.)

What can I say, I’m a sucker for a pretty sprocket.  And this pinwheel extruder drive gear is just gorgeous, and shows off that principle I keep going on about where making things more detailed or adding fiddly bits or cutting cool-shaped holes doesn’t really change the cost when you’re 3D printing.

The geared extruder module these gears are for also gets a fair bit of love from the community, probably because it’s such a large, inviting gear to add widgets to.  (Speaking of cool things with gears, that heavy-duty-looking gear box I linked a while ago?  Ended up driving a dimmer switch.  Which is awesome.)

The original model of this dinosaur skull was printed using a commercial machine with soluble supports, but the Makerbotted version looks pretty darned good.  Splitting it in two pieces and printing it fairly large reportedly did wonders for the print quality.  A great model, and really excellent print quality here!

Even without a 3D Printer they’re pretty amazingly versatile, but with a 3D Printer they are also a lathe, a centrifuge, a CNC Mill Head and here, a turbine that you could use as the basis for, say, a shop vac.  (Note to modelers the first person to make a mostly-printable shop vac based on a rotary tool will probably be hailed as some kind of Maker Superhero.)

The maker of this thing warns that, as the inside of that sleek dome is basically filled with plastic rectangles moving at high radial velocity, one should be quite careful and use eye protection when turning it on for the first time, which can mean the difference between an awesome lab accident story and the story of why you’re wearing an eye patch weeks after Halloween.

Because this right here?  Unmitigated awesome.

It’s moments like this– where I realize someone has compartmentalized the development of a complex toy which had a fair chance of going extinct until, well, arguably yesterday when this was uploaded, and made it into a downloadable file, where I just feel a little awed, humbled, and honored to be around to see and comment on such things.

I think we live in an age where, if you aren’t constantly amazed, you’re doing something wrong.

Home manufacturing boots you from the short-tail model of the brick-and-mortar stores to the long tail model of the web, because the things you print never sit idle, are never warehoused, and should they go unmade for months or years, never get put on clearance.  They lie in digital storage, dormant as nearly-massless, nearly-volumeless digital information.

And of course, Thingiverse will be happy to index them for you.

Here Duane (whose other designs have a similar lovely, pragmatic look) has made a key rack which conforms very neatly to the rings, lays close to flat and, being an OpenSCAD design, can be customized.  Beautiful!

Of course, with a 3D printer, “last minute” doesn’t equate to “rushed and sloppy” with quite the same dreadful certainty that it does with many other DIY projects, so just in time for a few weekend print runs before Halloween, here in no particular order are a few of my favorites from the Halloween Tag on Thingiverse!

Decking out a child of arbitrary head size with spectacles befitting a certain lightning-scarred wizard could hardly be easier than these, although above a certain head size and depending on your build area you might need to subdivide a bit:

It’s… okay there are a LOT of running gags in Futurama so I’ll just say the Brain Slugs are a good one.  And this might be the easiest costume possible that will still go over big.  Just print and attach, and act weird.  Well, weirder than usual.

Good prints that make effective use of two parts printed in different colored plastic tend to be instant classics, especially if the lines are good like this one.  Bat-tastic.

And finally, here’s a really great heap of Halloween Pandemonium in board game form:

I picked this out because it looked like a really great excuse to roll some tabletop strategy gaming into a presumably-already-high-geek-factor Halloween Party, of which I am always in favor.