Feature Friday No. 16 - 3D Prints that improve your 3D Printer and more

Welcome back to this week’s Feature Friday! Everyone who ever used a 3D printer – regardless of the brand – knows that there are always small things that could be improved, made more handy, convenient or so. That is not only the case for the 3D printer itself. Other tools can help you too to make the entire printing experience more enjoyable and the print result better. And today we want to show you some mods* you can easily take advantage of by creating them with your – and that is the really amazing thing about it – with your own 3D printer at home.

Our Home-Printed Improvements

At DimensionAlley we use 3D Printers from Sharebot and even though we are very satisfied with them we already made a few appliances for our printers and for other tools that helped us to make our lives more convenient. One of the first things we created were holders for our filament spools. Inspired by the spool holder of 3Dk.berlin we modeled our own version and ever since it made unwinding the filament from the spool smoother and blockages rarer.

Furthermore, we printed this “Duct Fan for Sharebot NG by kazuja” for our Sharebot Next Generation in order to cool down the filament faster and increase the quality of our print. And even though it was recommended to print the duct fan in ABS due to the high temperatures next to the nozzle we tried it with PLA and it worked out just fine.

At the moment we work on a solution for our biggest 3D printer, the Next Generation XXL from Sharebot. The build plate is 700 x 250 mm big and since it is only possible to use usual binder clips at the corners the glass is slightly curved. As a result the object does never completely touch the platform and is therefore warping or unevenness on the first layer. In order to prevent that from happening without standing next to the printer and holding down the plate manually (yes, we really did that) we are designing customized clips for the XXL that do not interfere with the print head and are strong enough to hold the glass down. There’s a picture of our clip in progress and we are going to share our final result with you on Facebook as soon as it is ready.

Other mods that make you and your 3D Printer happy *

Since we printed and tried only a few of the uncountable number of available appliances we advise you to either visit Thingiverse.com and go to “Explore > 3D Printing” or check out the following, very useful links (and that is really just a small selection):

Cooling Fan Extensions

Spool Holders

Filament Clips

Filament Storage Systems

Awesome Filament Colorizers (with Sharpies)

Filament Cleaning Appliances

Tool Holders

Boxes for Nozzles

Glass Clips

Scrapers for 3D printing bed

Webcam Mounts

Simply Cute

3D Printer Feet by SavageRodent

This article hopefully showed you some easy-to-realize ways to improve your 3D printer and printing results while turning the printing process into a pleasant experience. Have fun trying out the prints, give us feedback on which ones you thought were really helpful and if you have some other links you think should be added to the list, we are happy to hear from you.

Enjoy your weekend and see you next week!

*sometimes designed for certain 3D printers and/or models

*”Mods” = modifications