Actually useful everyday 3d Prints that AMAZE!

Hey guys, Tech Nibbers here. So, it's going to be hopefully an interesting video. Hopefully it will help some of you guys out there who are getting nagged by your wife a little bit. I actually didn't take too much effort to talk my wife into letting me get the 3D printer. The funny thing is, is I told her that I wanted one. And she goes, well what are you going to do with that? And I said, well you know, if we need a shelf I can print a shelf. Or if we need a spatula I can print a spatula. You know, it will make whatever you want. And she looks at me like I'm crazy. And she literally told me that I've been reading too much sci-fi. And that I was thinking of the Jetsons. So, YouTube to the rescue. I Googled a video. And as soon as she scooped her jaw off the floor she pretty much said, yeah you can get one of those. It's cool, you know. So, I had permission. I got it. Immediately I started printing a bunch of just random stuff. Seeing what it could do. Testing it out. Printing bases, toys for my kids. Stupid stuff. I'm going to show you quite a few of the things that I've printed here. But this video is more about useful things. We kind of got into it the other day. Where she said that the only thing useful I've printed with it is a shelf. Which is kind of funny because she's printed a ton of shelves with it. All at her request. And even a couple of silly items that I wouldn't have printed that she asked me to print. I made her a couple of things for her desk at work. Which she did really like. Not necessarily useful things. One of them was a name plate. And the other one was a pen holder. Which I guess is useful. And then one of her co-workers saw that and decided that they wanted one as well. So, I designed a little R2D2 phone stand for her. And she was happy to give it to her friends. So, it's not all bad. Sometimes it's hard to justify. Especially with as much as I'm playing with it. And making things that I want to make that she doesn't really see as useful. It's hard to explain to her. You know, this thing is really handy. In this video, I'm going to show you some of the more useful stuff I've printed. So, hopefully you can get some ideas of some stuff that you can print. In case you're running into the same problems I had. Where you need to convince somebody that this was a worthwhile purchase. There is a great 3D printing community on Reddit. If you haven't checked it out, I definitely recommend looking into it. And I had had a nice discussion with a guy on there the other day. Who had had some similar issues with his old lady. And she changed her tune as soon as he was able to sell an item or two. Now, I live in the middle of South Dakota. So, I'm probably the only one around who has a 3D printer. Within at least a couple hundred miles. The town I live in has 300 people. It's a town called Blunt. Yes, it's called Blunt. That being said, I don't really have a lot of people that know what a 3D printer is around here. Let alone people that want to buy my stuff. So, I have put a couple of things up on Etsy. I've sold a couple of things, but they were really small. Not really big ticket items. They haven't really covered the purchase of the printer yet. But, as I'm going to show you here in a minute. Some of the things I have printed, I do believe, have saved me almost enough money to justify the cost. So, over the long term, definitely going to be in the black. Even if my wife seems to think we're in the red at the moment. The Ender 3 only costs about $260 when I bought it. Now you can get one for about $210. Definitely recommend purchasing one. I'll put a link in the bottom of this video. And then, after you have the argument with your old lady. Maybe you can show her this video and she'll see some of the useful stuff it's good for. And maybe let you purchase one. So, let's get right into the useful things that I've printed on my 3D printer. I'm going to start off in what my wife would consider the useless section. These things are about form, not really function. The vases are functional and they're useful. I just haven't used them for anything, so it's hard to justify that. I made a couple of little baby potter plants. Those are useful. I haven't used them yet. So, I kind of understand her argument there. Then you have this giant mess here. And it does look like a mess. But I will say it would be a lot messier if it weren't for some of the useful things I've printed. Like this resistor rack. It holds all of my resistors. And then I have another component drawer here. This is a modular drawer called the Hive that you can stack. I plan on printing several more of those in the future. You'll see this plastic case I printed. A bunch of random junk I printed. And then the leftover crap. All of my scrap PLA. There and there. I have seen online a way that you can grind it down and make your own filament. We'll be doing a video about that soon. But for now, this guy here is a 3D printer that I'm printing. That's the nicest thing about the printers. They can replicate. It does take up a lot of room and that's why I'm so disorganized right now. So, we're going to go ahead and get out of my bedroom. Go around the house and we'll check out some of the more useful things that she actually does appreciate. Alright, so we're heading into the girls room now. In here, I have made these curtain rod end covers. Those are made in a purple haze PLA. The reason we did this is, as you can tell, we have two girls living in here. We kind of took out the closet and made some loft bunk bed type things. My wife did the paint job in here. It's amazing. It's too dark to see in there. We did that because there wasn't a lot of room in here. So, taking two beds out of the main floor space and putting them in there freed up all of this. Now, they call it the dance studio. But, with so many people in our house, we did want to make sure that they had a little private space where they can close their curtain and go behind there and change and not have to worry about anybody seeing them or being self-conscious or anything. It kind of just hides the makeshift closet. But when we put it up, it wasn't exactly meant for this angle. So, the metal covers that came with it didn't fit. So, as you can see, I printed these one at a time. And they came out pretty well. My wife actually loves these. They're very pretty. They pop pretty well. They cover the gaudy mechanical parts underneath. And they kind of tie together the pink and the teal there. So, I'm very happy with how that turned out. Now, we're going to head into the boys' room and see what I printed. All right. You'll have to forgive me. This is the boys' room. Boys are a little bit messier than girls. So, kind of a mess in here. We did go all out with the boys' paint job. We have some Iron Man fans. My youngest is a Lightning McQueen fan. So, they also have their own closet cubbies. And you'll notice that Tyrion, my youngest son, has got all this car stuff in it. It's red like Lightning McQueen. He's kind of a car's nut. And then the older one, he's the one I make all the Iron Man stuff for. That's Bo. He's a big fan. If you check out the remote holder back there, that little plate, the green thing, it's actually yellow. It's just the light making it look green. Which is kind of awesome because the light strips change colors. So, the shelf itself changes colors when you change the lights. That holds the remote for the light strips. And I printed one of those for each of the kids so they don't lose their remotes. And as you can see, I could go through all four cubbies and I guarantee you not a single remote is on that shelf. But wife wanted it, so I did it. We printed this here. It's a little shelf for one of his lights. This is actually an Iron Man light. It's not plugged in right now, so you can hardly see it. And then we did some other shelves for them. He's got a cup collection. These are actually done in a glow-in-the-dark PLA. And they came out really well and have been pretty useful so far. Probably the most useful thing so far is this measuring cube. It has pretty much all the standard sizes you need for baking or cooking. We did use this the other day to make some pancake mix and they came out really well. It's not exactly perfectly accurate. It's a little bit off, but it works well enough for baking and things like that. So it's a really useful piece. We've also made a couple of these clamps. Now this is a fully functioning clamp. It screws in and out. It does work really well. It prints in three pieces, so it's going to be the screw, the head, and the actual bracket here. It's a fast print. It prints really well. It works really well. Very useful. I use this for quite a few things. For holding stuff down, holding pieces together when I'm gluing, things like that. A lot of the more useful prints are going to be, obviously, utilitarian like this. The shelves, yeah, they're useful because they hold something, but they'll probably never move. They're going to be in that spot on the wall until I decide to get new shelves. This is a lot more versatile, useful item because I use it for several different things. This guy is one of my favorites. Very useful print. It holds SD cards, micro SD cards, and USB sticks. As you can see, it was one of my very first prints, and I was getting some problems with the bed adhesion right here. So it is a little warped on the end, but all in all, it's a very functional model, and I probably use this more than anything else. We pulled out the pool this year. I was kind of disappointed that it had a little hole in it. I don't know if you can see the patch there. My first thought when I saw the hole was, geez, how can I 3D print something to fix this? A 3D printer won't fix everything, so I had to use a regular patch. I was kind of disappointed, but it is what it is. Then I came to filling it up, and I realized that one of these clamps was missing. So, hooray, I got to bust out the 3D printer after all. As you can see, I'm a big fan of this purple PLA. This is PLA. We are outside. I know it's not going to last forever. I kept the model. I'm going to print another one in ABS. This was just a quick knockout because I don't have my enclosure up on my printer right now for doing ABS. This is actually working really well to keep the hose on. I know you see some water, but it's been raining. It actually has stopped the leak completely. So, another useful thing printed on the Ender-3. That's it, guys. Just a short list of some of the useful stuff I've actually printed. There are several more items around that I could show you, but I don't really feel like digging for them right now. One of the most useful things I've had printed so far are obviously phone holders, phone stands. I've printed several. I can never find them because the kids are always taking them. So, they come in very handy for watching YouTube, stuff like that. Like I said, the limits to a 3D printer are basically only inhibited by your imagination. So, if you look at something and think, hey, I need a piece for this, or I could do that if I had something that was shaped like this. It's great for filling in missing pieces or for finding ways to complete projects that would normally be maybe a little bit out of your reach because they require specialized parts or something specific.