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A Place to Stick Your Toothbrush

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

Fresh off the printer

Completed and installed.

Completed and installed.

Front Room Storage Bench

For the past couple of months, we’ve been working on two changes to the front room. The first was to ship my childhood piano up from my parents’ house in North Carolina. And the second was to build the storage bench pictured above.

I built this bench from scratch based on plans in Furniture You Can Build: Projects That Hone Your Skills by Joe Hurst-Wajszczuk. His version of the bench can be seen in the lower center of the book’s cover.

The bench is made of red oak from Spacht Sawmill, including some quarter/rift-sawn oak for the legs. Most of the construction was done at NextFab. This was my first furniture project, so not everything went according to plan. In fact, it turned out the book contained more than a few typos, for example, telling me to cut some pieces 33″ long in order to make a 34″ assembly. That doesn’t work out so well! And then there was the issue with the #4 “brass” (really zinc) screws that just disintegrated under hand-torquing, even with a pilot hole.

But I’m proud of the finished product, and now we’ll have somewhere to sit and remove our boots when we come in from the snow outside.

More construction photos after the cut.

IKEA + Lasers = Awesome

My wife and I have been talking about putting up a photo collage in the upstairs hallway of our new house, but we haven’t had time to work on it yet. I decided to help us get it started, as part of a Christmas gift this year.

My daughter and I made a trip to IKEA and picked up a few VIRSERUM picture frames in off-white, for $3-$5 each. I would have preferred pure white, but it should look fine in a hallway that’s currently painted tan. The important thing is that these frames have a wide, flat frame.

I then took the frames to the laser room at NextFab for custom engraving. I’m no Adobe Illustrator expert, so I had to play around with it a little before I was able to export a file usable by the Trotec 300. I also had to cut an alignment jig using corrugated cardboard, which took up a lot of time for something that ended up discarded.

Here’s a shot of the larger one mid-burn.

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And a photo of one of the smaller ones, completed.

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