My wife decorates the fall mantel every year, and I wanted to add something of mine without it quietly disappearing when I wasn't looking. That one goal kept me motivated enough to make a couple more fall prints too.
Our digital calendar's factory wall mount was perfectly fine. Then I installed a recessed outlet behind it to hide the wires and realized the outlet box might peek out from the side. I own a 3D printer, so...
Every store-bought shower organizer failed the same way. Suction cups quit, shelves crept down the shower head, and eventually the floor became our storage system. So I clamped a custom 3D-printed shelf onto an existing handhold, no drilling required. Seven years and thousands of showers later, it still hasn't moved.
TPU 68D and TPU 90A are both flexible, so it's tempting to treat them as interchangeable. They aren't. One prints cleaner and runs easily through the AMS; the other is softer and grips, seals, and cushions far better. The right choice depends on the job, not the label.
Put four plastics in one printer and some of them refuse to become friends. I pushed PLA, PETG, TPU, and carbon-fiber nylon through a coaster, an electronics box, and print-in-place sunglasses to see which pairings held and which quietly fell apart.
I put sunglasses printed in PLA, PETG, and PAHT-CF on a hot car dashboard alongside a store-bought pair to compare how the materials held up.
My first 3D modeling project began as a birthday gift: a play table for my son that could transform into furniture he would keep using as he grew.
In the summer of 2015, I set out to automate the sprinklers in a patchy rental-house yard. The first successful test became the start of my journey into programming, electronics, and making.