Six days from now, we celebrate the fathers in our lives – our own dads and other people’s dads! – to say how much we appreciate their work and wisdom.

This Fathers’ Day, we all have a chance to give things that we make ourselves. Things you make with your MakerBot are the new kind of hand-made, and they are durable, attractive, and handy, to boot.

With a tool that makes anything, you can customize a solution for a problem that you know irks your target dad, or find something on Thingiverse you know he would love to have sitting on his desk.

Here are some Father’s Day gift ideas from the MakerBot Crew. You can find all these and more under the Father’s Day tag on Thingiverse. If you have more inspiration for others, be sure to tag your uploads!

Fully parametric Tool Holder by benglish

Finally get all those screwdrivers off the workbench and onto a wall rack; but best of all, this file is designed to let you change it as necessary. Maybe you only need two holes, maybe you need 15. Maybe want to do a little modeling work and add your dad’s name to the bottom.

Cable Hangers by Revar

Does your dad have a thousand cables snaking across the floor untamed? Bundle them up with these cable clips. The best part is you can make as many as you need, and only as many as you need.

Remote Control Battery Cover by GregT

The biggest offense growing up in my house was losing the battery cover from the remote control. (But we needed AAA’s!) These days, a replacement cover is probably the best gift I could give him. Luckily Thingiverse citizen GregT has mocked up an example to encourage others to solve this pesky problem.

Drawer Dividers by Factotum and jherrm

You’ve been giving your dad socks and ties for years. Imagine how busy that drawer must be! Factotum’s Drawer Divider Generator will give you exactly the dimensions and number of dividers you need, and jherrm has given us all a similar file for smaller storage cabinets. Genius!

Printable Letter Scale by Maakit

A store-bought postage scale might set you back anywhere between $10-$20.  This amazing design from Maakit creates a working letter/postage scale you can build yourself and use with a minimal amount of calibration.  If you’re not sure if you need one of these – you might want to check with that special knitter in your life.  Besides using our postage scale for determining correct postage, my wife uses a postage scale all the time to weigh yarn when she’s designing knitting patterns – so she can give people a sense of how much yarn is needed for a particular design.

It may actually surprise you how many special mothers in your life might appreciate this exact gift.  You’ll have fun building it for her and she’ll love using it. ¹  (You really should call her more, you know?)

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1. Maybe you could even personalize it with an embossed message? [↩]