Maya threads a pass through the defense during her soccer match this afternoon, her sprained ankle having recovered fully. The weather has recently turned quite cold and her parents should have taken a clue from Maya and dressed more warmly for the game. Jeanine and I spent a good portion of the day rearranging furniture on the second floor now that the new floor finish has fully hardened.

The beauty of desktop 3D printing is that you can rapidly iterate on design refinements. Pictured above is my third version of a table top tripod. I have increased the size and height of the legs from my first version (shown below for comparison). In addition, I tapered the legs (which had the added benefit of creating some very cool carbon fiber patterns), increased the size and thickness of the shoulder joints and converted from a 1/4-20 to 3/8-16 mounting bolt. The result is a very stiff design that I would fearlessly trust supporting the $5,000 camera and lens combination I use for macro photography. This version was good enough to win Part of the Week at work, my first win since joining the company three months ago, a good indicator of the level of competition from my colleagues who each week create the most amazing entries. After using the new tripod for some actual work, I decided to increase the splay of the legs and make them a tad longer. I left Version 4 printing as I went home for the weekend and can’t wait to see the result when I return on Monday.

In any given week, I often volunteer to do failure analysis on a returned 3D printer. There is no better way to identify opportunities to improve quality and reliability than getting a first hand look at failures from the field. I take a very forensic approach to the work and enjoy getting to the root cause of subtle problems. What I don’t enjoy is scrounging around for the tools I need to do the work. For this reason I decided to make a personal tool caddy which contains exactly the right set of tools to inspect and service a Mark One printer. As an added refinement, I embedded magnets below each tool slot to keep the bits and sockets in place until needed. To prevent the magnets from jumping out of the print on to the print head (this happened on my first attempt), I embedded a series of thin blade sections from a snap off knife below the magnets. My first project which made use of embedding objects in a print made it clear to me what a great feature this is.