Adding magic to the mundane, one filament at a time.

Tag: steampunk

Music to Soothe the Savage 3D Printer

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!

3, 2, 1, … Liftoff!

Ticket to Ride, on a Rocket

As promised, we’ve been working on more train stations for our themed Ticket to Ride sets.

We love the rocket we added to our Steampunk set! It goes very well with the roadster trains we already had.

A Grand Day Out

It wasn’t until after we finished this design and added it as an option to the Etsy listing that we realized its thematic similarity to the rocket Wallace and Gromit built!

With all of his inventions, I think Wallace is truly a steampunk maker at heart. I can only imagine what he’d come up with if he had a 3D printer. Thank goodness he has Gromit to save him from all of the scrapes he gets himself into!

More Train Stations Coming

We’re also working on train stations for our Camping and Halloween themed Ticket to Ride sets. Unfortunately we weren’t thrilled with our first drafts, so it’s back to the drawing board. But we won’t put any pieces out there until we love them, which ultimately means nicer game pieces for our customers, and that’s worth taking the time to do right.

Satisfied Customer is an Understatement

Last week I wrote about the person who bought 594 game pieces in a single order. Today I’ll share the 5 star review he posted on Etsy.

“Ordered a variety of pieces for Ticket to Ride in various colors & shapes, and they are excellent quality! I really like the selection of colors and the different styles of tokens will be fun. I especially like the bright neon green & orange. Customer service was also great, and the order was filled & shipped very quickly, and was accurate. Wouldn’t hesitate to order from them again.”

Reading this review truly made my day. Thank you!

Other Things in the Works

We’re mostly working on themed train stations, but we’re also still plugging away at the Jankó keyboard (which turned out to need yet more design revisions), another version of our Collapsible Dice Tower, and a few other ideas we’ve been kicking around. Come back next Monday to see what we’ve added to our Etsy shop!

This Is For The Birds

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!

You’ve Been Punked!

Steampunked, That Is

This past week we launched both of our Steampunk game piece sets, and we love how they all turned out!

First came Settlers of Catan, with airships for the cities, roadsters for the settlements, and rows of gears for the roads.

There’s also a robber with a steampunk goggle hat!


Next was Ticket to Ride, which used the same roadsters for the trains, and includes a steampunk goggle hat for the scoring marker.

Overcoming Challenges

One challenge that is omnipresent in 3D printing is the difficulty of printing overhangs. Since the plastic is laid down in layers, each layer needs to have something below it to hold it in place. Otherwise the printer is extruding soft melted plastic into air, and it has nothing to stick to and hold its shape while it cools and solidifies. You can get away with very small projections, but anything beyond a 45° angle, or projecting more than a millimeter or two, will fail without support. There are ways to print temporary supports which can later be removed, but that tends to leave a messy surface where the support structure breaks away, and requires a lot of effort to clean up afterwards.

All of this means that printing the airships with noses and tails sticking out from the undercarriage was simply not feasible without added support. Or coming up with a whole new approach.

I decided to tip them nose up, so the tail would be printed first, then on up through the body to the nose. That let the tail fins support the rest of it as it printed, reducing the overhangs to something the printer could handle.

Printing Multiples

One of the advantages of having a printer with a large print bed is that I can print multiple items at once. It would take a ridiculous amount of manual effort if I had to print an entire Ticket to Ride set (48 trains and a scoring marker) one piece at a time!

Here’s a full set of standard Ticket to Ride pieces printing all together.

But there’s a risk to doing that. Having that many separate pieces on the print bed means the print nozzle needs to jump from piece to piece MANY times while printing the dozens of individual layers. And each such jump incurs a tiny chance that the nozzle will bump a partially finished piece, knocking it loose from the print bed and putting it out of position. And when that happens, the entire print job is usually ruined.

First, the loose piece tends to get pushed into others, knocking them loose as well. Second, the filament that’s extruded trying to print onto the failed pieces ends up sticking to other nearby pieces, ruining them and adding extra projections that in turn are more likely to be struck by the moving nozzle.

Here’s an example of one such failed meeple print.

And a failed Catan print.

Fortunately, I’ve got my printer configured now so that while it still happens from time to time, it usually works smoothly for straightforward prints like Standard Ticket to Ride and Catan sets.

What if it Still Won’t Work?

With more complex geometry, like our latest Steampunk pieces, this kind of problem happens more frequently. Sometimes I can correct it by simplifying the geometry of the model, which I did for every Steampunk game piece. But when that still isn’t enough and I can’t make it work the way I want, sometimes the only solution is to print fewer pieces at once. This reduces the chance of a problem, and also decreases the impact when a problem does occur, because instead of ruining a whole set, it only ruins a few pieces.

For the Steampunk pieces, the roadster proved the most problematic. (Which was particularly annoying, since it’s used in both the Catan and Ticket to Ride sets.) In the end I had to print most of them in groups of 8 or even 4, which makes producing them that much more time consuming. But they still look great, and it’ll be worth it if players like them even half as much as I do!

Increased Capacity

Fortunately, all of the resulting production delays have been more than offset by the arrival of our new printer!

As I mentioned last week, we chose to get a second Anet ET5X. Setting it up was not without its problems, but all in all it went way smoother than the first one, since I now have a much better understanding of how they work. Having the two of them running side by side makes us feel even more like a professional 3D printing shop!

A Change of Pace

Our current design work is taking us in a bit of a different direction. New game piece sets will be coming before long, but right now our focus is a special request by someone who wants a funky new set of keys for an electronic keyboard. Come back next week to see how this fun new project is progressing!