Winter came. And six hours later it was gone. Whew!
Winter has not stopped me from 3D printing quite a few new things. What I haven’t had time for, thanks to the craziness of day job, is finishing any of my big projects, or writing up stories around my smaller pieces. So, I’ve decided to just post some pictures and quick blurbs on what I have been able to accomplish, to serve as a snapshot in time and maybe some inspiration to someone looking for new things to try.
It is often said that the Art Deco period was an expression of optimism through design; clean lines, simple forms, smooth sophistication, pushing towards a brighter future. Whether or not that’s true, I like it; both in design and philosophy. It’s starting to show.
It’s probably more directly due to spending this weekend in antique stores in Bellingham and Anacortes, but when I sat down to make a new base for one of my wife’s IKEA lamps today, I ended up with a really cool design for something so incredibly boring.
Electro Tennis at the frog SXSWi opening party
For the past 14 years, the company I work for, frog, has been hosting the SXSW Interactive opening party. For the past three of those years I’ve played a role in it: brainstorming installation ideas, and building/coding really cool experiences for our thousands of attendees.
This year the core concept was turning digital experiences into analog ones, and vice versa. Additionally, one of the consistent themes of our party is to play with scale. So one of the experiences we set out to build was “Electro Tennis” (an electro-mechanical version of the classic Pong video game). But we decided to build it on an enormous scale — two 30′ x 25′ playing “courts”, each with a 12″ cube for a ball and 4′ x 3.5′ water tank for a paddle. In other words: giant.
After making the new version of my remote control holder last week, and hanging it on the wall, I saw a problem. Really, it was an aesthetic issue rather than a functional issue, but something I wanted to correct none-the-less. When the remote was placed in the holder, it would rock to one side or the other. The bottom wing was flat while the bottom of the remote is curved; the space on either side of the remote between the wings was larger than the width of the remote.
After learning that I needed to redesign the wall-mounted remote control holder due to its inherent design flaws — at least in the location it is in our home — I spent the past week trying to work out a better version.
My first at-home 3D printed object was a replacement for a wall-mounted ceiling fan remote control holder that had an arm broken off. Way back when, I thought it was going to be a great first attempt at learning how to mimic an everyday object and printing a new one, thus finding immediate value in owning a 3D printer. Yesterday I learned that I was wrong.
Just prior to slamming the extruder into my heated build platform (HBP), I was going to print a razor holder that would hang on the side of the wire baskets in the shower. However, after that horrible (at least mentally) event, I switched to something smaller (the shelf clip) so as to not waste plastic. The wait paid off.
So we have these metal “lockers” we got from IKEA that we use as media storage. When we moved recently, the movers lost one of the little clips in one of the units and that meant we couldn’t use the shelf inside. As I was thinking about small things to fix around the house, I remembered we were missing this clip and figured it would be a good experiment since A) it was smaller and thinner than anything else I’ve printed, and B) it had a challenging shape — it was curved and had a narrower section that would have to be an overhang.
In the end, it’s white-ish, and replaces the broken one very nicely.
my plastic future 
