Small teeth box

My small girl lots her first tooth lately, so I needed a small box to keep it: what else could I do besides printing one!

Here it is, the lid matches perfectly with the bottom! I printed this in transparent ABS, but will probably redo it in glow-in-the-dark PLA. If you want to print it, you can find it here in the warehouse

Small box to store the fallen teeth

And closed

Prusa i3 improvements

As I've been posting here, I have a prusa i3 on loan for a couple of months.

A few weeks ago, I got a piece that had no plastic deposited on one specific area, and was fine on the rest. This was very odd, so I had it reprinted and stayed around to see what happened. Immediately I saw that the extruder stepper motor was not turning. I looked around to try to see the reason for this, and found the culprit: a damaged cable:

Extruder stepper broken cable

I tried fixing it, by taking out the small metal tab in the connector, but that didn't work for long.
I talked to the owner of the printer and he had a spare cable. According to him this had happened before, and was a common problem.
The issue here is that a lot of stress is put on that particular cable as it travels left and right along the X axis all the time, plus vertically, although that is a slow and much less often travel.

Since I don't like problems that reoccur, I thought of a solution: a cable holder that transfers the stress from the connector to the cable, which is a point much less prone to failure. So I designed a cable holder that holds not only the extruder stepper cable, but all the cable for heating the extruder and for the fans. Here it is, printed in glow-in-the-dark PLA:

Extruder stepper cable holder

Extruder stepper cable holder

This makes the whole cable behave much better, and I think will also prolong the life of the extruder heating connections. I also printed one for the X-axis stepper motor which travels up with the Z-axis:

X-axis cable holder

You can find these models in the warehouse here.

While discussing this problem, I also realized the cable proving the heated bed with power also keeps traveling back and forth along the y-axis and so it would also fail sooner or later, so I also designed a little holder for this. You can find it in the warehouse here:

Heated bed cable holder

3D Printed zipper fix

I have been very busy with the 3D printer, and have a lot of pictures and material to post here, so stay tuned!

Today it's about a little fix: a broken zipper on my daughters favourite backpack.

As you can see in the picture, the zipper handler was broken, but she was still using the backpack, however difficult it was to open it.

The broken handle

This hardly asked for a 3D printer to fix, but, since I was busy printing stuff, why not print a handle for the zipper? So that I did.

The handle, in glow-in-the-dark PLA

I then used a dremel to cut a groove on the printed PLA (glow-in-the-dark) part, and used epoxy to glue it on.

This is the final result, she is very proud of it, and of me having fixed it, and she loves that it's glow-in-the-dark!

The handle glued in place