A suggestion was made to create a 3D printing topic. So have at it.
I’ve been doing a lot of stuff for models for a (hopefully future) model railroad. I’ve posted a number of projects on the Watcha Workin’ On O Creatives. I described a rock wall I’d built and had printed by Shapeways (more on that company later I hope).
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Here’s my final design for a corner rock wall, done in Blender:
I think I mentioned this is supposed to be part of the scenery around a haunted house I built back in 1996 or so. The house is on the top of a cliff, and one corner of the land is reinforced by the wall.
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I’ve been using Shapeways to get designs printed, because I don’t want to deal with the machine itself. Shapeways went bankrupt last spring, but like the Phoenix, built itself up from the ashes. There is a lot of information on the fiasco on their website. I tried CraftCloud in the interim, but didn’t like the results.
Anyway here’s the final product.
It came this way! It almost doesn’t need to be painted. But the resolution is much better than I expected. This is not the highest resolution you can get.
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They look cool! a bit of green wash to simulate moss and you’re done 
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I have not much talent for “artistic” designs. And I use my 3D printer mostly to print industrial parts for my projects. Here’s an insolator (for making cyanotypes) that my father asked to make:
The blue part is premade, the front and back are a mix of 3D printing and a printed transparency that later backpainted with silver.
The buttons are overlaid with black acetate to look opaque unless illuminated.
Fitted with custom boards and a premade PSU:
As for the insolator itself it was built with a modular piece that needed more research, tbh 
Individual pieces looked like this:
Assembled with a couple wooden rods to add stiffness
And ended up looking like this:
ETA: (note: I’m not deprecating myself here when I say I’m NG with artistic designs. Ask me to sculpt a brick wall and I will fail badly. Ask me to design a functional retro interface and I’ll shine through like a lighthouse through the fog )
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Amazing work.
I had to look up cyanotype—really neat technique. What does the insolator do?
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If I ever need one I’ll let you know!
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Cyanotypes are cool indeed. They are the predecessor of the photocopy (is Xerox still a word? ), and the reason blueprints are named like that. You basically draw your schematics in transparent acetate, impregnated some paper with cyanoferric solution, exposed it with an insolator, and voila, (near) instant blueprint! And unlike photographic paper, you can soak the solution in anything that is soakable, so… paper, cloth, potato starch, concrete… you need to wash it lightly later but is much more easy to work with than common photographic solutions.
It insolates, DUUUUUUHHHH
That would be for my father to explain better but my take on it is that while you can use the sun to “get” the picture, you can use an insolator to get a more controlled exposure. It is basically a set of UV lights with a dimmer and a timer.
The old ones used fluorescent tubes but these are difficult to source, expensive, bulky and fragile so my father asked me if it was possible to use UV leds. I did a bit of research and turned out it IS possible.
Here’s a photo of it being tested without the diffuser:
Unfortunately we are still ironing some kinks, namely that the LED strips are a bit dimmer than expected, they break down too easily and when they break down they tend to take the rest of the lights. Planning to replace with bigger LEDS so we don’t need that many.
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That’s a lot of LEDs!
Do you have any test results to show?
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The following were made using the old insolator (which was borrowed from the photo lab).
From negative by contact (so you print a negative image the size of the page and put it just above the soaked paper. this is basically a blueprint).
Direct exposition (you put the objects upon the soaked paper and insolate)
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I’ve been designing and printing small sets of rhombic dodecahedrons that snap together such that the centers are vertices of a truncated cuboctahedron. Modeled in Tinkercad, printed on Prusa Mini+ printers at a free local maker space, JLCD, associated with Portland Community College. I call it a rhombic fun ball, but it is more of a puzzle.
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wow, that’s awesome!
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I love playing with things like that, especially when Zooming with people. Have to have my hands busy. Do you have a CAD file to show?
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I have the STL files and will post them, but it needs a page of documentation I haven’t done yet – numbers, hints for printing, etc.
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Wow, if you want to do that, great! I guess I was thinking more of just a screen shot of the mesh, as I did above with the wall. Of course if anyone wants an STL file, I can . . . hmm they are huge . . . upload it somewhere?
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I usually upload them to github -you can set it to private and invite individually if you don’t want it to be indexed- if I don’t want to comercialize them or share them too publicly (I also have taken to upload big files that I want to share to the BBS in my internal server, but that’s only a solution for me ) otherwise printables, thangs or thingiverse are the common ones.
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This is another model for my train layout
I used a number of images of old traffic lights to suggest the design.
I got the parts printed by Shapeways a while back, using their highest resolution printer. Here’s the result, with a short length of brass 1/16" tubing as the post:
It’s a little over an inch high. It has a 2x3 mm (I think) yellow surface mount LED. The light is steady here, but I want to have it blinking slowly, using an Arduino board.
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I won’t go into too much detail at the moment, but wanted to share this:
ETA: No working video at the moment. I’ll try to fix it later…
In the meantime, here’s a photo:
The model is from Printables:
Printed on a Prusa i3 MK3.9S with Polymaker PolyLite PETG in Translucent Red.
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I love it!
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