I came up with a silly idea for a 3D printing project. My wife and I use an electric toothbrush with interchangeable heads. And whenever we aren’t using it, we generally just leave the head on the floor of the medicine cabinet, which is kind of messy and unsanitary.

I figured I could create a simple toothbrush holder using SketchUp, and print it out on the RepRap at NextFab. For the most part it worked.

The only snag I encountered was that I must have set up my SketchUp file to be in inches and exported it to STL, and the Slic3r gcode generator assumed that I was using millimeters. So when I first tried to print, instead of getting something 2.5″ long, the machine just put a single dot in the middle of the plate and cheerfully informed me it was finished. I was able to fix it by scaling it by 2,540%.

Below are pictures of the final product.

Fresh off the printer

Completed and installed.