Guys. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic here (Covid19). There is a shortage on toilet paper, PPE and other things. Since I always like to be prepared, I made this emergency SPAM box.
Disclaimer: you can’t actually break the glass, it’s plexiglass.
I love my kamado! I’ve been wanting to design a custom bbq table for it because the old table didn’t have enough counter space for me.
The top us a custom granite piece with rounded nose on top, and custom cut out designed specifically for my bbq.
I created a little UV curation station/enclosure using a 405nm LED strip, MDF, and some clear PETG for some style!
I’ve been building my own CNC machine this year, and slowly designing parts to go with it. I needed a dust shoe to collect all the wood and MDF shavings. Didn’t want to pay $150+ and it seemed like a fun project to design to get acquainted with airflow.
The pink version was my first design. It was comprised of 2 parts (actually 3 but 2 were glued together for better printing orientation without supports).
The idea is to have 1 piece permanently attached to the spindle. The other piece snaps down vertically into the mount. In theory it seemed like it would work, but in practice, as the CNC cut deeper, the materials would push up against the brushes and make the piece pop off 🙁
Into the trash and onto V2. I still wanted the show to have multiple pieces so I could remove the parts and have room to work under the spindle.
The ring, after being squeezed into the flat plate under it, mounts onto the 80mm spindle. Then the front and back pieces slide on to the plate via a groove, then the front and back pieces are secured with binder clips!
The brush strip can be found online, and is just cut to length. There is a groove inside that lets you jam the bristles and the part was designed to be nice and snug. It was printed in PETG for durability.
There are many spool holders out there. The problem is there are many spool sizes that makes it hard to build a universal one that works well. I decided to make a spool holder that mounts horizontally and uses the weight of the spool itself to keep the spool in place.
This is version 7 of my design, it’s still in progress and was a good motion study for the joints in CAD. How will it work in practice? We’ll soon find out.
I receive (and send) lots of packages from my front door. I love creating scaled versions of things, particularly undersized. I decided to recreate a small version of the classic USPS mailbox for my front door as a place for packages to be held.
Additionally, my idea is to add LEDs, a camera, and make it WiFi enabled so I can monitor at all times, assuming the delivery carriers understand what it’s for. Hopefully I can make it intuitive enough but still retain the classic unmistakable design.
I envisioned this to be about 2 feet tall. The parametric design would let me adjust the dimensions. The hardest part of the design (and newest challenge for me) is the curved top. So far, everything I’ve created is pretty square. For this, I’ll have to use some tricks to make the curved top.
Cutting this took forever! It’s basically an alternating pattern of cuts. In Fusion360, I measured the inner curve length, and built a new piece based on that. The outer curve length is irrelevant for this because the cuts would provide the longer length that I need.
It came out super bendy! So excited. After test fitting the top curve, in the future, I’m going to make the piece slightly shorter than the inner curve surface. Even the the top is doing most of the stretching, the bottom also stretches as well so leaving some room would do just fine. I didn’t leave any tolerance to i had to really tape down the piece well during the gluing process.
Always remember to use the correct height when setting your laser/bed distance. The laser beam is hourglass shaped, and the middle of it should be the middle of your material. I didn’t quite adjust it right so the edges were slightly angled and required a little sanding.
Emma wanted to be the first one to deliver a message in the new mailbox. She is the best!
I had a difficult time deciding on the right amount of storage. I think the majority of packages will fit in here. it’s roughly 13x13x17.
Glued all the pieces together. I used tape to hold down the top curved wood while using wood glue. Everything came together as expected!
After painting, I added the logos and also lined the inside with colorful rainbow card stock. I also added a little disclaimer label in case somebody actually believes it’s a real mailbox.
Here is the mailbox with all the logos and actually being used outside!
MDF legs on concrete are not great. I’m going to design flexible TPU feet for it to protect it from bumps and scrapes, but also leave it off the ground to prevent moisture.
My original designs were built for 6.4mm MDF. I adjusted the material thickness to 8mm, then generated this STL for flexible TPU. The reason is that I’ve found that TPU needs quite a bit of tolerance. Even if there is extra room, I can fill it with glue.
20% flexible TPU infill + 2mm tolerance fit perfectly! The flexible material really helps to protect the piece and also prevent it from sliding.
Using double sided padded tape, I mounted a camera to the top and now get motion alerts. Going to finally put this project to rest for awhile. Thanks for reading!
I absolutely LOVE my Class 4 CO2 Laser cutter/engraver. But it definitely needs some improvements. I’ve added custom lighting, camera, and analog milliamp reader to it and needed a control panel to manage everything. I designed this as an inset panel that controls the AC lines (which are connected to a new UPS).
My 3d printer always prints a little larger. My designs need about 0.5-1mm tolerance for fittings so I printed out this flat plate to test the panel mounted switches and hole placements.
I custom designed in OpenScad this front of the cannon with LEDs
The back was designed to have holes exactly the size to mount LEDs in. The pieces were printed with “translucent” PLA to diffuse the light.
I found a mini helmet online and printed a small scale version of it.
This is the assembled first print. There was so much sanding that I had to do. I learned a lot about how to fill holes and smooth out the lines in the print. The support material that was broken off left so much work to be done.
Especially around the yellow lightbar the print was really rough. The post prep on this part was intense.
Did about 5 sessions of filling and sanding with bondo before I got it to a point where it was nice and round. Here’s me holding the canon. It has a handle inside. Still need to build the electronics.