The hobbies for the homestead thread got me thinking about the uses for a 3D printer on the homestead. I have no use for the normal little trinkets that many people print. I work with a guy that makes tons of crap, but I don't want any of that laying around. I purchased my 3D printer in order to make useful household stuff. Here's some of the stuff that I have made to use around the homestead.
Here's the first really useful item that I made. I mainly made this to prove to my wife that the printer was no just a toy. It's just the handle to a Pampered Chef mini spatula, but it proved to her that I didn't just blow $200 for a new toy for me.
I use Harbor Freight storage cases for a lot of the stuff in my basement. They are great, except there are just the standard bin sizes. So I have printed out a bunch of bins for these cases. I really like the resistor bins. I can have 18 different compartments for resistors in the space of a single large bin. Everything that's not yellow, I printed.
I'm a fan of Ryobi tools. I have a bunch of the batteries. This is a power supply that uses a Ryobi One battery to either give a 5V USB output or 0-18V output on the banana plugs. I have mainly used this to power the fan to "turbo charge" my ceramic grill. But I'll be using this for a lot of stuff while camping.
Now that it's Spring, I'll be planting the garden. I've printed out a ton of these plant labels. The black is just magic marker, but only because I have not gotten my printer dialed in to change filament color mid-print. Once I get that right, I'll be printing the type in a different color.
I removed barbed wire off some fences. That left a wide open fence post. So I printed up these fence post caps to keep the water out.
I printed this just as a toy. It is useful, but I doubt I'll use this for much. It's a clamp that works surprisingly well for a plastic clamp. There's quite a few parts, and they just screw together.
I reorganized my "network closet" and this is how I mounted my network gear. That little orange thing is a RJ45 plug that keeps dust and debris out of the port, that's also printed.
These last couple are just tool storage items. The first is to mount my Ryobi drills, glue gun and tire filler between the floor joists in the basement.
This last pic is a hanging mount for my Stihl Kombi attachments. They keep dirt and debris out of the attachment and allows you to hang them out of the way.
I've printed very few decorative things. I did print a COVID-19 bobble head, but not much other crap.
With COVID-19, I've also printed several masks that use either cotton pads, fabric or furnace filter material as the filter. But the most useful item has been ear relief for keeping the elastic of a mask off your ears. I've given out dozens of these things. They are the longer red things in this pic.
