My greatest masterpiece of 3D design / printing so far

The windows in our house have these tiny little housings that hold magnets to keep them shut

The only problem is they are incredibly junky and break all the time

I used a free app called @tinkercad to re create the design as closely as I could

And printed them out in my office closet on this @snapmaker 3d printer

I’d say it took about 5 hours of time total (not including printing time) to do the design and troubleshoot early prototypes

When I got the 3d printer, I was worried it was going to collect dust. But I've used it much more than I thought.

There is also a great @tynan post on this https://tynan.com/3d 

If you don't have a 3d printer, you can use the "3D print my thing" subreddit.

Here, you can pay someone local to print something at home and mail it to you for pretty cheap. https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprintmything/

I remember a few years back when stock newsletters were predicting a 3d printer in every home. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.

Too much of a learning curve.

And the design, print, tweak, print again process is still very slow.

This is a hobbyist's game.

But I do think there will be little neighborhood / friend group 3d printing setups.

Especially if we enter some kind of depression / apocalyptic scenario where people need to repair their stuff and make it last longer.

Footnote @VGR tweets on this theme