Tag: christmas

Music to Soothe the Savage 3D Printer

May 12, 2021 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

A Long Haul

It’s taken us two months, dozens of test prints, and several design reviews with the buyer, but we’ve finally finished the Jankó keyboard project that we started back in March!

But First an Apology

This week’s blog post is a bit late. Sorry about that! I got my second COVID vaccine shot (Moderna) on Saturday and it really wiped me out. Thankfully there was nothing super urgent to do for 3D Orcs, so I was able to take it easy and let my body recover from producing a bunch of very welcome antibodies. I’m now nearly back to normal, with just a sore arm left to tolerate.

Well, I guess I’m still tiring easily too, so today’s post will be on the short side.

The Final Stages of Jankó

Once we were finally happy with the key design, we still had a lot of printing to do.

Here’s the keyboard with most of the original keys, and just our few test keys installed at one end. But there are several new keys ready to go!

Because the Jankó keycaps overlap neighboring keys, they need to be installed in order from one end, so all of the original keys had to be removed first.

Here we’ve started installing the new keys. It was fun to see the offset black/white pattern start to emerge!

Getting close!

All keys installed!

It was awesome to see it all come together after so much work! But the best part was yet to come.

The Completed Jankó Keyboard!

Finally! Fully assembled and operational!

It’s very cool to see our 3D printed products incorporated into an actual functioning electronic device! And the customer is very happy and excited to learn to play it!

In Other News

One of the last things I did before my COVID shot wiped me out was play a game of Ticket to Ride – Europe. Like the last time I wrote about this game, we used several of our custom game pieces, making for a very eclectic board appearance!

This time I used green canoes from the Camping themed set, my wife used a set of black Christmas sleighs, my father-in-law used purple Steampunk roadsters, and my mother-in-law used the yellow heart themed set we gave her for Mothers Day.

Did you notice her spiral heart Train Stations? Those are new! So new, they’re not even listed as an option in Etsy yet!

Pursuing B2B

Aside from adding the spiral heart Train Stations, this week we’ll be turning our attention to exploring some B2B (business to business) opportunities. We want to see if some local small businesses are interested in buying 3D printed versions of their company logos, whether for their staff or their customers. Wish us luck!

This Is For The Birds

April 12, 2021 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

A New Dice Tower

We launched a new version of our Collapsible Dice Tower this week!

This one was inspired by the game Wingspan. If you know the game, you’ll recognize the dice in the pic.

In fact, we had this in mind when we started designing our first dice tower. Like the cardboard dice tower that comes with Wingspan, ours can be disassembled and stored in the game box. That’s why we made it collapsible in the first place, and why we chose the size we did. Since we knew we were planning this Wingspan version, and we wanted to be able to use the same basic structure, we used the same design principles for our first tower.

We did the keep first because we anticipated the TTRPG (D&D) community would be more interested in dice towers and would find that style more appealing. But we’re very happy now to add the one we envisioned to begin with.

594 Game Pieces

Any guesses what that number signifies?

This week we received our biggest order to date. Twelve sets of Ticket to Ride game pieces! And two of them were for the Europe version, including train stations. All told, that came out to 594 individual game pieces, and really kept our printers busy!

Even better, the buyer liked our custom themed sets!

He bought four Halloween sets,

four Steampunk sets,

two Christmas sets,

and two Camping sets.

There’s going to be some fun game nights in that household!

More Train Stations

The train stations have been a popular addition to our Standard and Christmas themed Ticket to Ride sets, so we’re planning to add them to our other themed sets too. Which will we do first? Come back next Monday to find out!

Snowmen in April

April 5, 2021 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

A Christmas Wish

As I mentioned last week, a customer requested train stations for our Christmas Ticket to Ride set. Who are we to deny a Christmas wish, never mind that it’s either several months late or even more months early.

We’ve now added snowmen as Train Stations, to go along with the sleighs and gifts, making this set even more festive!

Ticket to … The North Pole!

That same customer pointed out something very cool that I hadn’t known existed – a Christmas-themed Ticket to Ride board!

It looks like a lot of fun, and goes perfectly with our Christmas game pieces!

Prepare for an Invasion!

Barbarians are coming to Catan! We’ve now launched standard pieces for the Cities and Knights expansion.

These barbarians behave rather differently than the ones in the Traders and Barbarians expansion, and we’ll be adding those too sometime soon.

Our Etsy listing lets you choose either a player set,

or the shared pieces needed to play this expansion.

The knight and metropolis discs were a bit of a challenge, since the standard ones come with stickers or are pre-printed respectively. But I think we came up with an effective way of representing the same things by adding physical surface features.

We’ll be adding pieces for this Catan expansion to our themed sets too, but that will be a little more work because of the way the wall and metropolis pieces need to fit with the city pieces on the board.

Looks Good Enough to Eat

As another fun little side project, I decided to surprise my wife with a pin depicting the logo for the company where she works.

Here’s the logo.

And here’s the pin I made her. And she loves it!

My Ulterior Motives

I did have other reasons for making the blueberry pin. I’ve tried in the past to do two color printing by pausing a print, switching filament, and then continuing. So far success has been elusive (despite digging into the details of gcode), which is why we don’t yet have any such products in our Etsy shop.

But another way is to print two separate objects and then glue them together. So this was my first foray into that approach, and I must say it came out very nicely!

My second ulterior motive was to try my hand at converting a 2D logo into a 3D print. I’m hoping this might lead into a new direction for 3D Orcs to pursue, and I’d say it bodes well. If you have a company/team/club/organization that would like custom 3D pins, fridge magnets, etc., based on an existing logo or requiring design from scratch, drop me a line at “customer.service(at)3dorcs.com” or leave a note in the comments below.

Pink is Back!

I mentioned last week that we were having problems acquiring an acceptable replacement for our pink filament, since it’s no longer available from our previous supplier.

I’ve now found one that works and looks great! Even better than our previous brand, in my opinion.

I was very happy to re-enable the availability of pink on all our Etsy listings!

It’s Now Easy Being Green

Also regarding color choices, we’ve added a second green to our lineup. All of our game pieces are now available in both dark green

and light green!

We love adding color options because it’s always more fun playing games when you can use pieces in your favorite color!

A Second Dice Tower

Our design focus for the upcoming week will be developing a second version of our Dice Tower. Come back next Monday to see if it’s ready to go!

Back on Track

January 4, 2021 / admin3dorcs / 1 Comment

Life Happens

Here at 3D Orcs, we’ve been experiencing some major life changes (the good kind!) over the last several weeks. Because of that we put some of our work on hold, and sadly that included this blog. Things are settling down now though, and operations are once again going full steam ahead!

Etsy Sales

Even during the crunch we were able to keep our Etsy Shop open, and delighted many customers with our various sets of game pieces.

Most popular was Christmas Themed Catan,

with Standard Catan

and Christmas Themed Ticket to Ride following close behind.

We were thrilled to ship our game pieces not only all across America, but also to Canada, Ireland, England, and Germany!

Seafarers of Catan

In our last blog post, we hinted that we would be launching game pieces for a game expansion set. We did!

We now have standard pieces for Seafarers of Catan available

as well as a Christmas themed set.

The sleigh ships look amazing when played along with our Christmas pieces for the base game.

We’ve got plans for pieces for more game expansions as well as entirely different games. Please let us know if there’s a game you love that you think would be enhanced by custom designed game pieces and we’d be happy to add it to our list for consideration. You can leave a comment on this blog post, or email us: customer.service(at)3dorcs.com

Made to Order

During our slowdown we still undertook some design work, though we had less time for it than we’d have liked. We’re really excited about the results though! The designs need some more work before they’ll be available for sale, but we’ll be announcing them here over the next several weeks.

First up will be a set inspired by a customer request. Someone contacted us through our Etsy Shop and we’ve been working with her to bring her vision to reality. I can tell you now that it’s another themed set of Catan pieces, but you’ll need to come back next Monday to find out more!

A Ticket to Christmas

November 10, 2020 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

Changing Plans

That saying about the best laid plans of mice and men apparently also applies to orcs. We had planned to release an exciting new product this past week, but despite our best efforts the results just weren’t good enough. We’ll keep working on it though, and we’ll save the details as a surprise when it’s ready to go.

A Different Product Instead

Because of that, we switched gears mid-week to something else we wanted to do soon anyway, and that turned out great! As a result, we were able to launch a new Christmas-themed set of game pieces this week after all!

Nearly Thwarted

But even with a great design, we needed to produce some prototypes before we could list it on Etsy. And that was nearly thwarted when a mishap caused a collision between an orc and the printer. It turns out orcs are exactly as graceful as one might expect. The wheels allowing smooth movement of the extruder along the X axis were badly damaged … sorry, I don’t mean to get too technical. In orcish terms, “Printer broke. It no work.”

But we were undaunted! Well, ok, we were actually pretty daunted for a while there. But as is becoming common with this nifty device, a generous dose of blood, sweat, and tears (which are as common in our studio as at an orc family gathering) resulted in a working printer, and an increased understanding of its amazing technology. Plus, we learned a new adjustment that makes the leveling process much more precise. Yay!

These are the wheels that were damaged. Unfortunately we didn’t snap a pic until after they were fixed.

Christmas-Themed Ticket to Ride

With things up and running again we were able launch our new game pieces!

The sleighs look really great on the board! So do the Christmas gift scoring markers (you may recognize them from our Christmas Catan set, where they are featured as settlements).

And because Ticket to Ride needs a lot of trains, you get a lot of game pieces when you buy this set! Just as in the original game, we provide 48 sleighs instead of the 45 actually needed to play, so you have a few extras in case some get lost.

Expansions

Do you like to play with game expansion sets? We do! And so this week we plan to release some new game pieces to support one of our favorites! Come back next Monday to see what we’ve developed.

‘Tis the Season!

November 2, 2020 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

An Exciting Week!

Welcome back! We had an exciting week at 3D Orcs, with the release of a brand new set of Catan game pieces, and a fun Halloween activity. I’m going to keep you in suspense just a little longer about the new Catan set (Hint: today’s blog title is a clue), and tell you about our Halloween fun first.

GISH Halloween Hunt

I hope you had a fun Halloween! At 3D Orcs we suspended operations for the weekend to take part in GISH – the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt. If you’ve never heard of it, I encourage you to check it out. Although it’s called a scavenger hunt, it’s more about creating fun things than finding them. There were dozens of items on the list, but we tackled just a few of them while our team mates worked on others. Here are some of our favorites…

We made this charcuterie Ouija board (essentially a themed meat tray) featuring pepperoni and ham.

And this evidence that the “unbread has risen” for the zombe apocalypse.

We also discovered the secret desires of a storm trooper.

And made ourselves into custom Tarot cards.

One of our most challenging tasks was creating this socially distanced trick-or-treat “aid”. It needed to be a Rube Goldberg device that could deliver candy from 10 feet away. The difficulty arose from needing to set up those dang dominoes over 30 times before we got a video where everything worked correctly!

We also enjoyed the new definition of “monster mash” – a classic movie monster made out of mashed potatoes. We were quite happy with our Frankenspud!

Did you do something fun for Halloween? Was your spookiness challenged because of COVID-19? Let us know in the comments below!

It’s Christmas in Catan!

Here’s our new set of Christmas-themed game pieces for Settlers of Catan!

Each set comes with 4 Christmas tree cities, 5 Christmas gift settlements, and 15 sled roads.

And anyone who buys four of these sets gets this FREE snowman robber as a special bonus!

The Catan board looks great decked out for Christmas!

Missed Our Halloween Sets?

Halloween may be over, but you can still get our Halloween-themed game pieces for either Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride.

More Christmas Fun Coming!

Those Christmas Catan pieces are great, but we’re working on more fun Christmas-themed game pieces. Come back next Monday to find out more!