YofI

I've found that the regular fiberglass driveway reflectors that you can get at a big box store last for a season or two but then they become awful to touch (fiberglass in your skin) and are very fragile to being hit or bent. So I designed this shape to sit on top of a 1/4" (6.35mm) steel rod that I painted and hold these reflective stickers . Available on Printables .

For an upcoming ceramics project I wanted to produce some textured clay that looked believably like fabric. I ran into the following problems Believable texture rollers weren't available for download or purchase. The displacement maps I found didn't look enough like real textiles when used in isolation. Following the tutorial, the vertex count and file sizes became enormous The top and bottom of the roller also became rounded off , making the first layers impossible to print without supports. The full story Couldn't find what I wanted Texture rollers are used to create all sorts of patterns on clays (search "clay rollers") and also for creating scenery for table top games.  But despite there being tons of texture rollers online, I couldn't find any good fabric textures available as prints and even what I could find for sale wasn't believably knit. Making rollers with found displacement maps So I found this excellent tutorial and got to work.  Finding t

Porlex Mini Grinder   Okay, okay, I don't mind the morning ritual of hand grinding coffee beans in a manual, crank grinder, BUT when you've got guests and you're trying to make 4 or more cups of coffee, the quaint hand crank process can become a tedious chore for someone with their pre-coffee anger. So, I had the idea to use my old drill and a 3D-printed drill adapter to drive it super fast. Adapter in loco       This was my first time using CAD and a 3D printer in years and was great starter project.  It took a couple tries (first started with just 1/4" hex shank, but fattened it up to 3/8".  I also learned the importance of perimeters and infill and bumped those up to 8 and 100%. Fusion 360 and STL files are available on Printables .

Hello and welcome to the Year of Invention Blog. It's my intention to use this blog as a simple place to document projects, what I learn, what tools and processes I used, and what I'd do differently next time. Once started, I hope the blog continues to document my creative projects reasonably indefinitely, using very loose definitions of "invention" and "year."