MakerBot Industries

If this sounds familiar, I apologize. You wash your pots and pans carefully, and on the rare occasion, even use soap. With your dishtowel, you dry off the last remnants of H20 and with any luck, you have a clean, water-free, cooking tool…with no home. The top of the stove looks convenient, until your last night’s sauce pan gets in the way of your cast iron skillet for your daily ostrich, bacon, and cheese omelet.

I’m a sucker for practicality and to this day have been looking for a good place to store my pots and pans. The cabinets work, until I have to stack one item on top of another, inevitably dirtying the bottom pot or pan. PolygonPusher‘s hook is brilliant: Strong, functional, and cheap. I’ll be printing some of these today to hang underneath my kitchen side table.

What’s particularly interesting about this Thingiverse item is the conversation about the, well, practicality of printing out such an item, when it would seem that these hooks could be sourced locally. PolyGonPusher gives a great explanation for why he did what he did, and it’s yet another example of what makes Thingiverse a fantastic forum for 3D design and printing.

Hook for hanging pots and pans by PolygonPusher

In this project I build a set of shelves for hanging pots and pans in my kitchen. For that I needed 27 hooks. In my local hardware store I did not find any suitable hooks so I decided to design and 3D print my own! :) This also saved me some money since a simple hook in the store costs $4 a piece, making the total $108!

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Here we have a very exciting new Thingiverse item: a Lego-compatible train!  This is a seriously viable toy, especially since we can already print compatible train tracks.  Add in the Lego blocks that you’ve already got at home (don’t pretend you threw them out…) and voilà: infinitely customizable train set!

You know, for kids.  I mean, I definitely don’t see any adults printing out these parts.  Who plays with toys at our age?

Thanks are due to prolific Thingiverse modeler sconine, who created this (and other) awesome 3d models for playing with.  I’m sure that he just printed these parts out to make sure they’re optimized for play.  For children to play with, I mean.  These things are for kids to play with.  Kids.

Toy Train for Legos by sconine

This is a derivative of my original train thingiverse.com/thing:11101 This version has wheels that work on the standard wood tracks that are a fairly common kids toy. There is also a 3D printer version of these available here: thingiverse.com/thing:8805 This version also accepts Legos and Mega Blocks. You can just snap them onto the top and build whatever you want.

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Miniatures for War Gaming by epengr

Thingiverse citizen epengr posted their very detailed and well finished gaming miniatures.  While many people have asked about whether a 3D printer is suitable for creating gaming miniatures, this is the very best example I’ve seen. ¹  These little guys were clearly painstakingly painted to look like a real army.

Miniatures for War Gaming with DBA or FoG Rules by epengr

These are a selection of elements that can be used with the ancient miniature war game rules De Bellis Antiquitatis or the fantasy version, Hordes of the Things. They may also work with Field of Glory, but I'm not very familiar with that game system. The most current version of these rules can be downloaded from the developers website (http://www.wrg.me.uk/) in the "History of WRG" section. They are planning to release a new version for sale later this year. These rules are sol as rules only, leaving it to the players to acquire figures from whatever vendor in whatever scale they choose. So why not just print your own! I settled on 10 mm scale after trying 15 mm and 6 mm. At 15 mm, the resolution limitations of the printer are rather obvious. At 6 mm... well, I just wouldn't want to paint 40 little men for one element of troops... 10 mm is a nice compromise and it give a good impression of massed troops. So far I've uploaded 4 of the 16 element types in the game. I hope to design the rest and upload them soon. There are a few additional elements in HotT such as dragons and Behemoths that I may or may not tackle, but I encourage anyone interested to jump in and supply their interpretation of these units!

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1. This was a farily common question at Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 [↩]