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!

On Teacher Appreciation week, I’m remembering my elementary school teacher Ms. Harrelson, who said nothing has to be perfect; just give it a shot and see what happens.

Unfortunately for Ms. Harrelson, I made something on Monday and it’s basically perfect. This was really exciting because it was one of the first things I made with my new Replicator, I barely changed the default settings, and it printed flawlessly the first time. Behold, my apple.

Apple by jbakutis

This started with the purely awesome Original Apple logo in 3D by acen. I wanted to photograph some of our people here offering an apple to a teacher they really liked. But acen’s has a bite taken out of it. First I discussed with the design guys how we could change this into a dualstrusion model, with a red peel, and natural colored fruit on the inside. Jason suggested another route: why not split acen’s model in half and mirror it to get a whole apple?

Bing, bang, boom.

I made this on a Replicator at 0.27mm layer height, feed rate of 55, 5% infill. I wanted something that would look good from a distance in a picture, but I’m telling you this thing looks beautiful. No cracking, no irregularities, and honest to goodness practically no effort. In Replicator G, under Scale, I clicked on “Fill Build Space!” – or in other words, I Keith-ed it¹ . This made the model 6” tall, so I scaled down by 0.7 to get an apple that’s just over 4 inches tall. For this, we made the leaf a separate piece, so this isn’t a dualstrusion file.

Sminnee asked on Thingiverse if I used any support material, but the answer is no. I might add another shell if I make it again; I just used one this time. I wonder if the very top, right where the leaf piece fits snugly into the apple itself, would have looked smoother with a little more structure in that area. One of our modelers, Jason, thought the model should have a hole all the way through the center of it. This gives the stem area, which dips down, a little beam of internal support.

But on account of the hole all the way through, this is also now a possible jewelry piece.

There are several fruit pieces, fruit bowls, and other accessories on Thingiverse (listed below). So here’s one more for your collection, or perhaps you think your mom would want a fruit bowl on Sunday. Enjoy!

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1. not surprisingly, I did this at Keith’s suggestion. [↩]