1 December 2015

My first 3D design...

I've been having a lot of fun playing with my 3D printer, downloading and printing things posted online.

This is the first object I've created from scratch, and although it's simple, I'm quite proud of the result.

What are these things anyway?
I have a small set of poker chips I use for games with friends. It's OK for 4-5 players but because it has just 200 pieces, and the highest denomination is only 5,000, we sometimes run out of chips.

It's really a very handsome set, and fits nicely in it's wooden box/tray with enough room for exactly 200 chips. There are also a couple of slots in the case intended to hold cards or dealer buttons etc.

However, decks of cards don't fit when the lid's closed for storage. And you only need one dealer button for pretty much all types of poker.

So although there's no room in the box for more chips, there's plenty of room in those slots for some plaques.

...those square-ish things on the right
The next sensible denomination for my set is 25,000 ten of those would round it out nicely (and we could all pretend to be James Bond).

A cute little afternoon project then, I'll design and print some custom poker plaques...

27 October 2015

CTC Bizer Duplicator... My new 3D printer

I've always found it interesting, but until recently 3D printing has been just a little too expensive for me to pull the trigger on buying my own machine.

A couple of months ago I saw an auction on eBay for a decently-priced clone of a MakerBot Replicator and had my impulsive "Best Offer" bid accepted instantly...*gulp*

Je ne regrette rien
Before MakerBot went all evil, they put out a really sturdy open-source machine in the Replicator. 
Predictably there are now some really affordable clones of the original Replicator available, and the version I bought was from a company called CTC.

This was the version I got, plain black plywood with an aluminium heated bed

16 October 2015

It's Aliiiiiive...

Just stumbled across my old blog from years ago...

Turns out I'm still paying for the domain. It'd be a shame to keep it empty so I'll start to share details of some of my hobbies again.