Who else uses 3D printed Coffee Accessories?

Yeah, they’re a lot of fun. I think the real fun begins when you learn to design your own stuff (I’ve just started that). Something from nothing.

I remember twenty years ago I saw a 3D printer in a machine shop. It was huge.

@dutchy101 how cheap is the printer? It really looks cheap. I’d be leery. That kid’s toy was multiple colors which would be very hard to do on that printer I bet.

Someday, though, they’ll be as common as a tablet computer. Everyone will have one on their counter to print stuff they need.

The price on the Indegogo site is about £75 - so pretty cheap

thusband All looks a bit too good to be true to me.

It’s certainly cheap, but a couple of things jump out that would make me think twice:

• 0.7mm nozzle. They tout this as a positive as it makes the printing fast, but the down side they don’t mention is that the flip side is resolution. It means you can’t print a line less than 0.7mm wide.
• Very small bed size. The max size you can print is 80×80×80. I think this would be pretty limiting. For comparison a 200×200×200 print size is not unusual. You might think you never print anything big, but once you have one you start seeing opportunities. The lamp shades in the hall and kitchen are 3D printed. This easily lets you have a very modern look for pennies.
• It looks like it’s exclusively app controlled to work. This concerns me, especially for a new company. Without maintenance an app vanishes, and then you’re left with a useless piece of hardware. Apps also cost money to maintain, and at some point they will come looking for revenue. Perhaps a charge, or they discontinue support. It’s a fact of life that if you own something app controlled or that relies on the cloud it has a definite shelf life.
• A lot of 3D printers go onto crowd funding sites and don’t make it

That doesn’t mean it would suit a particular persons use case, and it’s certainly cheap, but I’d make sure I was comfortable with those limitations.

I use a dosing funnel designed to fit my eureka zenith 65e grinder, it’s a simple thing but does save a lot on spillage, and by a lot I don’t really mean so much the amount of coffee but the time and hassle of keep cleaning it up. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4773071

@SiblingChris I’m still trying to find the perfect funnel for my Niche. I have several that are close but no cigar. I think the answer is to design my own but I’m not there yet as far as Fusion 360 goes and Tinkercad might not have the capability. I’m not sure yet, though, as I’m still learning my way around.

Thanks @SiblingChris. I haven’t seen a few of those. Others I’ve tried. I use a Decent portafilter holder and it throws most funnels off. I’ll give a few of the ones I haven’t tried a whirl.

I got sick of my WDT tool and niche brush cluttering up the top of my espresso machine.

10mins of design, and then 4 hours of printing and I came up with the following.

It’s basically just two tubes of the correct size and a small lip so that it can hang of the side of my machine.

You can see it on the back left. I’ve also taken to hanging my dosing ring on the side too.

This looks great - wouldn’t mind one of these myself

I was looking at getting a 3d printer but wondered how hard it would be to learn and what I would make if I could work it all out So I looked at some sites and found some of the things people make looked really useful. Maybe we should have a section just for 3d printing especially coffee related tools and accessories. Getting one is still on my list, and convincing the wife how useful one would be and how all gadgets I could make which would make her life so much easier.

hornbyben Very clever. I’m going to look at doing something like it. Thanks for the idea!

Meldrew There is a learning curve but it’s all so much fun and folks on most forums are very helpful. My big thing was which printer to buy.

dutchy101 I’d be more than happy to share the file if you have (or have access to) a 3D printer. Drop me an email and I can send it over.

Meldrew I find my 3D printer really useful, but unless you just want to print trinkets off the internet I think it’s essential to learn CAD. Being able to design something for just your need is what really makes it useful.

If you’re interested you could have a go at learning CAD and then once you’ve gained the skills get a printer. I use OpenSCAD (http://openscad.org/). It’s completely free and runs on Linux, windows or Mac. There’s a bit of a learning curve, as you program the model. This makes it really precise though, and very efficient as you can reuse code. You can also load in libraries of other code. Don’t just install it and try to figure it out though, as that would be very frustrating. Instead follow the tutorial in the documentation and you’ll have the basics in no time (https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_Tutorial).

To give you a feel of what it took to design the holder I did the following.

• model the tools
  • The WDT tool was just cylinder of the right diameter and height
  • The brush was a cylinder of the right height and diameter joined to a truncated cone to flare out the end for the brush (in Openscad this is just a cylinder where you specify two diameters, one for the top circle and one for the bottom). This was then moved across a bit so they are side by side.
• Create the holder
  • This was just two cylinders a few mm larger than the largest of the tools. There is a function (called hull) that joins objects together.
  • Add the lip that hooks over the edge. This is just two cuboids.
• Remove the model of the tools from the holder
  • This is done with a function called difference. It removes one object from another.

hornbyben Thanks for the info, It’s just getting the old grey matter into gear. I will take a look at the software and see how I get on. I hope to get a new Mac soon.

Meldrew good luck