For Christmas last year, I did a lot of stuff with my 3D printer. For me, it’s a compromise between “hand made” and “doesn’t look stupid” because, well, I’m neither artistic nor very good at hand made. I never really got the chance to talk about them, as I ended up being very busy this spring, so I wanted to do a little show and tell since I had a bit of time to write. Here’s a brief selection of what I made:

Magic: The Gathering Lamp

Using some lithograph techniques I saw online, I decided that it would be fun to make a lamp using the various colors and manna symbols of Magic: The Gathering for Sally. Here are a few pictures:

This took some experimentation to get right, in particular because all of the pieces (including the base) were prone to delamination. I finally got around this by using the ABS slurry to stick it to the heat bed, but ended up ruining the Kapton tape more than once. I’m still looking for a good way to do this – my last round of prints didn’t have this problem, but I’m honestly not sure why; lucky alignment maybe.

Guild Wars 2 Lamp

Using the same idea as the Magic lamp, I made a Guild Wars 2 lamp for Jessa. Instead of doing the colors of Magic however, I did the races of Guild Wars 2. I was able to use many of the same scripts, but I added to the design of the lamp base, and tweaked the printer settings a bit. Overall, I like how this one turned out, and I plan on iterating on the design at least once more.

Breach: Starship Duels

This is a project I found online at Thingiverse, and immediately caught my eye. One of my stated goals in buying a 3D printer was to create game parts, and this seemed the perfect opportunity to try printing out an entire game. I put this together (at 150% scale) for uncle Clayton.

This took a bit of work to calibrate because the starships were quite detailed, and didn’t always sit right on the print bed. In the end I managed to get a reasonable pattern, with minimal cleanup afterward. The other fun part was painting the hexes – this involved thinning some paint with water, and dripping it into the crevasses. It took a couple of coats, but I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, and I am really looking forward to putting a set together for myself at some point.