A swift holds a skein of yarn while it is being wound into a ball, so you don't have to fight it all the way.

If you're a hardcore knitter, you buy your yarn from hippy communes in faraway places, or you spin it yourself[1]. This gives you yarn in skeins - long loops that are good for dyeing, but non-trivial to knit with. To get it into a ball, you need someone or something to hold it and prevent tangles, while you do the winding by hand or with a ball winder. That's where the swift comes in: it holds a skein of yarn, and rotates gently on demand, allowing to you to unwind/rewind yarn as needed without requiring a large family to assist you.

The canonical example of a swift is the umbrella swift. Wikipedia has a picture: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_%28textiles%29 . We[2] wanted something similarly light, yet sturdy enough for the wildest of knitting parties.

The arms of the swift expand to the diameter required for the skein when you press the top disk downwards, at least 1.8m for the parts given here. It is mounted on a rod around which it can rotate freely, but with enough dampening to not over-wind. It just feeds you yarn on demand.

A video of the assembled swift: youtu.be/Rj0PEjT_9D4


[1] Disclaimer: we are not knitters, this is merely an observation.
[2] I'm not the only one, rspanton was also involved in this project thingiverse.com/user:902

I needed a replacement drawer for my small parts organizer and looked around thingiverse for a starting point. I liked the drawers attached to the Small Parts Cabinet thing so I ginned up a parametric OpenSCAD script to create something similar. Almost everything about the script is adjustable. The included stl is a standard drawer with three compartments made to fit a store-bought organizer.

Redesign of the outer enclosure for a cheap iPhone4 dock/cradle. Hopefully the cheap Chinese docks are all the same, and someone else can find benefit from this work. Found with the original dock you have to remove your protective phone jacket/case to use it, as the clearances are designed around the phone itself, rather than any 3rd party case or jacket you may be using. Could have easily taken to the original dock with a dremel and a vengeance rather than go to this design effort, but when armed with a 3d printer and a desire to see if good lookin' custom electronics enclosures are within your reach - well, why not!

The big win for me with this design was getting the method down for thinking about enclosures split into two (or more) parts to enable good, overhang free, 3d printing. I also used this build to investigate ways of finishing the print so it looks good (and acceptable to my wife - the end user of the dock!). I was really happy with how the thin walls worked out, it's pretty close to an injection molded part.

So I was attempting to make the HBP Quick Leveler, but I was having trouble getting a clean print where the parts fit together.

So I put it aside.

But then I realized that the thumbscrews alone greatly improve the TOM's out of the box leveling setup.

Simple!

This setup is working very well for me.

UPDATE: fixed Y2 issue in thingiverse.com/thing:13802 to enable both parts to be printed with the tentacle.

You may have made a lovely polyhedron with mrules snap-together vertex design, thingiverse.com/thing:4893, but what polyhedron is complete without tentacles? Exactly.

A box that closes with clips.

Whilst ruminating on Project Shellter, I was reminded of visiting seaside towns in Oregon as a kid and seeing necklaces and earrings made by running nautilus shells through a band saw... so, I fired up SketchUp and with the help of skimbal, created a set of earrings which will be a Christmas gift for a good friend of mine.

UPDATE: After talking to some female friends, they suggested the front should be closed, to avoid getting them caught in hair. I had planned on doing that anyway to make the part a little stronger, so now there's a closed version too.

This is possibly the first free & open-source long-sleeved collared shirt available online! Normally you'd have to buy a paper pattern, trace it, and cut it out... now you can download this file, cut it out on a laser cutter, and start stitching! Some people claim that a laser cutter is overengineering, but I say nay! Furthermore, the design can now be crowdsourced and improved.

TODO: Sizing, align collar notches, pocket, better photos.

Expanding my digitally fabricated jewelry collection, I decided to create a pair of lightning bolt earrings for my first project using the Makerbot. I designed these electrifying earrings using Autodesk Inventor software and extruded the sketch by .1". The lightning bolt measures roughly 2-1/4" long. Although slightly warped, I am happy with the way the earrings turned out and look forward to wearing them!

This is a toilet paper holder. You can use it to hold toilet paper. This is a good thing to have for when you have toilet paper, but nothing to hold it with.

Well, this is my first attempt.
This is a capodastre for folk guitar but it might also work for classic.I haven't printed it yet because I haven't finished my printer. No idea if it's thick enough to resist pressure. But if anybody feels like trying...

I participated in a kickstarter campaign to fund the pulse sensor: pulsesensor.com/. I recieved it and it's great but I thought it would be nice to make an autonomous heart rate monitor.
So I added to my arduino a Nokia 5110 LCD that you can get from Sparkfun, adafruit or ebay.

After some coding I had a nice heart rate monitor with text and some nice graphics and thought I should make a case to make it even nicer. After a few minutes in sketchup I had a case for the LCD that I am sharing today.

I also included the arduino code if somebody is interested it is based on the code from the creators of the pulse sensor and the excellent Nokia 5110 library from adafruit (https://github.com/adafruit/PCD8544-Nokia-5110-LCD-library).

Added a variant using TV Out for those which do not have a LCD screen. you will need the TV Out libraries that you can find on code.google.com/p/arduino-tvout/

Do you think the Politicians have it all Wrong? Is your Mayor a Bumbling Idiot? Are your local City Planers out to kill you?

Well now you can prove them all wrong! Demonstrate your city building mettle with the Sim City 2000 Tabletop Play Set!

All the Thrills of being a real City Planner, without the boring environmental impact statements.

But Watch Out! Disaster can Strike at any moment! The Devastation of the Spilled Coffee Flood! The Clean-Up Alien from the In-law's House! The Horror Of the Attacking 1000 foot 3-Year-Old!

Roy is a bunny that can sit on your desk or act as a pencil topper.

The local supermarket doesn't sell the paper cases used for making cup cakes and other similar baked goods. They do sell baking parchment though, so I whipped this up in Openscad.

I designed it to be printed, but as I do not yet have a 3d printer this is still untested.

Thank you to everyone who commented on my things! A big thank you to MakeALot who pointed out that something wasn't right with the diagrams. Details in the updated code.

A Cool rocket in the funky retro style (maybe a little art deco?).

Ready for Flash Gordon to save the world in!

A request from Patrick G. via facebook.com/GE

A Flying Toaster!

Another request from the first week of the GE Air Show. Some of us are even old enough to remember the flying toaster...

Idea submitted by Sarah M. to the GE Air Show at Facebook.com/GE

The evil purple tentacle from Day of the Tentacle! He wanted to rule the world, now he can rule your desk... :)
All of you, who don't know him should play the game, as imho it is one of the best adventures out there. besides monkey island ;)

Snap together 3D printable truck-like robot. Unlike the cool-but-ultimately-non-functional Tank designs ( thingiverse.com/thing:6554 and thingiverse.com/thing:8080 ), this bot actually works. Sadly the motors could not generate enough torque to actually move the tank robot due to the amount of friction introduced by the worm gear and tank treads. Encouraged by the success of my 27 to 1 Reduction Gearset thingiverse.com/thing:9414 I designed this bot from the ground up to be low friction, snap-together and almost entirely 3D printable. The only non-printable components are the motors, the motor mounting screws, the batteries, the wire and the nuts that serve as contacts in the battery holders. I hope to upload some PCB mounts soon so you can easily add the electronics necessary to make this bot autonomous, but if you are impatient I recommend looking into NBitWonder's awesome DC Motor Driver thingiverse.com/thing:7618 which was designed for the tank-bot.

I used this script to design the gears: thingiverse.com/thing:3575 (You will need to download the scad to use the attached truck.scad file). I also used this script to generate the battery holders: thingiverse.com/thing:5079

VIDEO:
youtube.com/watch?v=F-qvDO9QZV4
As you can see from the video, the left rear axel isn't spinning freely and needs some sanding/filing.

UPDATE:
I fixed the drag on the left rear axel by replacing "axelholder.stl" with "wheelholder.stl" in conjunction with "axelend2.stl".
youtube.com/watch?v=o3SWtk4X-1Q

UPDATE #2:
I uploaded design files and instructions for the electronics:
thingiverse.com/thing:11055
youtube.com/watch?v=ZA7mihbLalw

UPDATE #3:
Parametric oversized snaptogether 3d-printable wheels:
thingiverse.com/thing:14347
youtube.com/watch?v=9cWYPE-cpFg

NOTE:
This design is based on the tolerances of my cupcake 3D printer. As several folks who printed out the 27 to 1 gearset pointed out, the Thing-O-Matic has much better tolerances, so some of the snap-together parts may need some glue (or openscad tweaking) if your printer is better than mine!

This is a simple Holder which I made to use my Zoom H1 Reccorder with my Camcorder (Panasonic SD707) and my DSLR (Canon 500D).

It simply uses the Flashlight-mount on both of these cameras to be attached. The H1 has a standard screw-tread which can be found on almost any tripod, so you could use this very holder to attach other things than just the H1... (you might want to get crazy and attach a second camera to your SLR :D)

The Position of the mic does not interfer with the 35mm Viewangle of the camcorder, there might be a problem if you intend to use a wideangle-adapter.

To reccord i simply attach the Linout of the H1 to the LineIn on my camcorder.

For the DSLR, I simply lay the Audio over the Video after reccording as the 500D unfortunatly does not have a LineIn (Only Mono-Sound *eeeek*).

The soundquality with the H1 is way better as the mic is able to reccord uncompressed 24bit 96khz .wav files.

A Project to make Replacement parts for Beyblade Metal Fusion(TM). So far, I have made a standard Performance Tip called Beyblade Base.stl
If you noticed, the first and last picture/file are the same except one id upside down. I recommend printing the upside down one.

Please test it :)

The last 4 files are .wings files in case you want to edit it.

I added Beyblade Bases 6 and 7, and hopefully, they will be more printable.

A solenoid-powered dancebot.
Designed by BeatBots for MAKE Magazine.
Video at vimeo.com/26191062

One of the things I have purchased in the past (and are usually not very cheap) and could be effectively printed by my MakerBot (which I am still waiting for my kit) would be molecular model kits. I quickly made up some common bond configurations and types. I will probably add some more once I actually have a MakerBot to test the prints. I kind of eyeballed the tetrahedral atom so print that at your own risk (as with the rest of it). I am also including the scad files so you can add additional types, change the relative atom sizes (to represent the relative sizes of different elements), bond lengths, and so on.

Snap-together 3D printable gearset providing a reduction ratio of 27 to 1. Inspired by this thing thingiverse.com/thing:7379 and I used this script thingiverse.com/thing:3575 to generate the gears. The primary advantage of this design is that it uses only printable parts-- no fasteners, nuts or bolts.

This is a replacement clip for a tackle box I purchased. The model can likely be scaled to fit your needs, though I'm not sure if there are any "standard" clip sizes. I modeled the part from the original manufactures piece using a photograph, a digital caliper and Google Sketchup. This may be a good candidate for OpenSCAD but I've yet to learn how to use it.

The replacement I printed actually snaps and holds tighter than the clip from the manufacturer!

Here's a link to my blog post showing the modeling/printing of the part: thenewhobbyist.com/2011/06/everyday-fixes-with-makerbot-3-tacklebox-clip/

I always have need for a good/better vertex to construct space frames.

This derivative thing just makes a few 'improvements' to the original design.

First of all, I've modularized the code somewhat. This doesn't make any particular improvement, but it will make it easier to see what's going on, and how to add to it in the future when more vertices are needed.

Second, being the slave to phi (1.618) that I am, I changed things like the thickness of the connector to be proportional to the radius of the rods that you're using (instead of a fixed value).

I've also made a change such that the length of the connector is automatically calculated proportional to the length of the rods that you're using. The base size is 10mm, and it grows by an appropriately 'phi' influenced length. So, the ones for a 36" rod, for example, are closer to about 20mm, rather than 10mm.

With these changes, it becomes rather trivial to make good new connectors for any size, by just changing the single diameter value, and the rod length.

I've played with a lot of vertex designs over the past few months. This is one of the most compact, and easy to utilize. I give props to Sjoerd de Jong for the simplicity of the design.

In the picture, the struts are 36" long. The overall height of the structure is about 8'. With this design, the fit is strong enough that you can actually assemble the thing with one person. If you've ever done dome development, you might recognize this is a 'good thing'.

looks cool

This Thingi was compelling to export to .stl from .blend. There were many disableing factors but indeed after five hours of export alter export I finally got it printable. It made me happy, well except that it took over two hours to print. But it looks good. There is still more learning to be had from this file so I shall now post it for anyone to experiment with.

The single STL file(horse1.stl) is all that is needed to print this Thingi but I will post the blend also just in case.

5-16-2011 I have updated the files so that the parts are 3mm thick. This makes a more stable Dino. Please Enjoy.


Well I've been hopeing that someone would make one of these. Seeing that no one did, I decided to get off my butt and make one myself. I hope others will have some fun with it as well.

I used this dino as my insperation, and then traced the plans in Sketchup. epiloglaser.com/sc_dino.htm I don't Know who the creater is, but I would like to say thanks for the plans.

YAPML yet another poor man's library that makes things finding it hard to render and taking its time to compile.

In this case the self-replicating polyhedron is intended to give a mechanical touch to your freshly (or not) designed cylindrical surfaces. Hmmmm... you can also thing that those things all-around the cylinder are diamonds and use it for jewelry.

The examples scad provided uses OpenSCAD MakerBot Font Module by grokbeer licensed under BY-SA-NC license (link in the instructions section)

Photos... aubenc.imgur.com/knurled_finish_surface

UPDATE:
(Just in case you don't read the comments bellow)
Video by sirmakesalot (thank you very much!!)... youtube.com/watch?v=uz8h--NsX7E


Things using this library :-)

Bowden Clamp for Ultimaker by owen
thingiverse.com/thing:11864

Spindle for 5lb spool by mikeq
thingiverse.com/thing:12871

Knurled "topper" for stepper motors by Pazu
thingiverse.com/thing:13978

Ultimaker Hobbed Bolt Release by bkubicek
thingiverse.com/thing:14505

Hobbed bolt holder by coffeeMaker
thingiverse.com/thing:16136

Shane's Coral Frag Plugs by sgraber
thingiverse.com/thing:16982