My foray into 3D printing got off to a rocky start. I originally unboxed and assembled my printer on the dining room table. Everything worked great until I moved the printer upstairs. During that process, a wire that controlled a critical cooling fan failed. When the fan failed, a pretty important part of the printer cooked itself. Fortunately, instead of buying the printer directly from China, I purchased it from TinyMachines3D, who priority shipped me a replacement part. When that didn’t fix the issue, Chris, the owner of the company, worked with me over the phone until we got the printer up and running.

With my printer offline, I had some time to play around in Tinkercad. One of the first things I designed was this robot from the 1980 Stern arcade game, Berserk.

With the printer finally back up and running, I decided to see how it handled this model.

Not bad! I also printed the stand that Greedo is standing on. It worked so well that I printed half a dozen more.

While I was printing, Morgan told me she wanted a “sweater-shaped cookie cutter” for Christmas cookies this year. One sweater-shaped cookie cutter, coming right up!

The other thing I wanted to print, something I have wanted for a long time, was a tiny set of risers for these little Diener figures I collect. I love the way the different colors display, but it’s hard to see the ones in the back. Not any more!

If you look closely at the risers I printed you’ll see that the top section is black. That’s because I ran out of the 200g of white filament that came with my printer and had to switch to the 1kg spool of black.

So, how much can you print with 200g of PLA filament? Two dice, one headless cat, a 4″ robot from Berserk, 7 stands for Star Wars figures, one sweater-shaped cookie cutter, one set of mini-risers 40mm wide, one set of mini-risers 140mm wide, and half a dozen aborted screw-ups.