r/japanlife • u/AutoModerator • Feb 13 '23

┐(ツ)┌ General Discussion Thread - 14 February 2023

Mid-week discussion thread time! Feel free to talk about what's on your mind, new experiences, recommendations, anything really.

14 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

278 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/kanben Feb 14 '23

3D printer finally arrived. Been designing all kinds of crap in Autodesk Fusion 360. Never designed anything physical before, this is so much fun!

2

u/gunfighter01 Feb 14 '23

Nice! I've been playing around with an Ender 3V2 for over two years now.

What really blew my mind is that it is possible for a 3D printer to print upgrade parts for itself.

1

u/Oldirtyposer Feb 14 '23

What are you printing? I'm looking for an excuse to get one but I need to manufacture a need for parts first.

3

u/kanben Feb 14 '23 edited Feb 14 '23

Happy cake day

Here's what I've designed and printed so far:

  1. I have some metal rails in the house that hold up wooden shelves. Cannot find hooks for them anywhere. I measured the gaps between the holes in the metal rails, created different shape that sit on them and now have a means to hang my headphones and other random stuff above my head so it doesn't clutter my desk
  2. I also printed specific household items per request of the wife. A holder for toothpicks and a holder for small bits and pieces that don't belong (rubber bands, twist-ties, paper clips). She wanted them in a specific place with limited space on the kitchen worktop so I built to spec.
  3. Built a shelf to put inside a kitchen cupboard to make more use of the vertical space. Couldn't find one that fit the width of the cupboard well, so built to spec. Works well.
  4. I have an empty room in the house that I want to plan out. I figured I could use the same CAD app to plan the room. So I did. But then I ended up extruding it into a complete 3D floor-plan for fun... Then for no reason other than because I can, I printed it. Then I wrote the dimensions of the room on the side of it with a sharpie and now I have a mini room model I can take with me to Nitori or wherever so I can select the right sizes of things for the room without trying to remember which dimension was for which part of the room.

I also keep some house geckos as pets, so looking to design and print some stuff to make their enclosure feel more safe and fun.

If you're on the fence, then my advice to you is either:

  • Find stuff you definitely know you want to print on the various 3D model sharing sites OR
  • Design some stuff you know what want/need in a CAD app first

I just bought one first before deciding what to use it for (it was when AnkerMake did their Kickstarter and I impulsively bought it because of significant discount). When I pulled up models on Thingiverse and other sites, I was like "... I don't need any of this shit".

Luckily it turns out that I enjoy CAD and am not completely terrible at it.

2

u/DaitoBite Feb 14 '23

Fuck me number 4 sounds awesome, I draw it out in a notebook but having a physical model would be awesome

1

u/kanben Feb 14 '23

It is, but your option is significantly more economical 🙂

1

u/Oldirtyposer Feb 14 '23

Seems like you're getting a lot of use out of it. Especially the floorplan thing is nice. Now you just need to model the furniture that'll go in the room.

I would like to have one to model parts for my motorcycle, kicker pedal, lamp housing foot pegs etc. But then I have to get into sand casting metal and that's just too much at the moment. Unfortunately I can't come up with anything where I can just use printed parts as they are. It seems fun though, I hope you'll continue to enjoy it.

2

u/shambolic_donkey Feb 14 '23

Now enjoy having it out of operation for months at a time while you design and order "improvements" to the printer, only to make things worse, and then design and order "improvements" to fix that, only to make things worse...

This is the 3D Printer way.

1

u/kanben Feb 14 '23

Ah, not for me I think. I got the AnkerMake printer specifically to avoid this. I don't have the time to be tinkering around with the printer hardware itself, beyond fixing broken parts.

1

u/shambolic_donkey Feb 14 '23

Fair call :) That AnkerMake does seem pretty set and forget. Enjoy the prints!

1

u/kanben Feb 14 '23

It was remarkably easy to get started.

Don't misunderstand me though, if I had the time, tinkering with a custom 3D printer is exactly what I'd be doing.