Five of RMRRF’s Most Insanely Creative Models YOU Can Print!

Over 4,000 makers, modders, mad scientists invaded my home turf of Colorado for the 2024 Rocky Mountain RepRap Fest. Over two weeks ago. By now you've already seen the homebrew electric discharge machining, bootleg Lamborghini, and the flying gantry printer that's so flying the gantry is literally a quadcopter. Gimmick projects get stale, but your projects are timeless. I cut through the hype and scoured Irma for hidden gems that you can print yourself right now. I'm talking tools that transform lives, the jinkiest printer I've ever touched, and mesmerizing mechanisms that push the possibilities of the potential of pure printing. I'm Zach Friedman and these are my favorite DIY projects from Irmurf 2024. Welcome to Colorado, home of the Rocky Mountain RepRap Fest and the one and only Voidstar Lap. Ladies, gentlemen, and cyborgs, this is a Nerf Blaster. With a twist, you twist the handle to prime it. It's a pun. Well here's the twistier twist. Apart from the darts and spongy cords, this entire blaster is 100% printed. Let's pull the trigger on this funky foam flinger after we show today's sponsor, Brilliant.org. I can't wait. What do programming physics and data science look like? Scribbles on whiteboards, pages of code? They shouldn't. These equations describe real things that happen in real life. That's why Brilliant's courses are packed with interactive demos that blend theory and reality, so you build intuitions about how real phenomena work and then crunch the numbers to learn how to mess with them. As you dive deeper, Brilliant actually adapts to your learning style and presents multiple ways to approach each problem until you find one that finally clicks. That means less frustration, more light bulb moments, and better real-world learning that prepares you to bring your new skills into your next project. Whether you're looking for an edge at work, building skills for a side project, or just plain curious, Brilliant's giant collection of thoughtful, interactive content is yours to explore at your own pace. Visit Brilliant.org to get your first month free and get 20% off their already quite affordable annual subscription. Dive into electronics, astrophysics, whatever fires you up at Brilliant.org. Thanks to Brilliant for sponsoring this episode, and now let's talk about URMURF's loudest sponsor. Polymaker was everywhere. They sponsored a 3D-printed drag race, a 3D-printed destruction derby, even a 3D-printed Nerf blaster shooting gallery. Now, I love 3D-printed blasters. I'm literally made of 3D-printed Nerf blasters, because I printed some in chocolate and I ate them. Wait, that episode hasn't come out yet. But Polymaker's DIY shooting gallery had some wildly weird blasters that showcased their filaments in a truly clever way. This is the Morocco by Lethal Dynamics, and you prime it like a lever action, except you work the entire grip. Or you hold the grip steady and you flap around the rest of the blaster. No matter which way you sling that thing, it feels super satisfying, it looks supremely cool, and unlike every other blaster in my arsenal, it doesn't need a parts kit. That's right, the Morocco is oops all filament. It's held together with dowels, clevis pins, retaining rings, all 3D-printed, no McMaster order, no waiting for shipping. This is a paid model, which I normally don't feature, but I made an exception, because if you've got some elastic shock cord, a few darts, and a reel of literally any rigid filament, you already have everything you need to build this blaster. I went even further and found an all-filament magazine. The simple Talon mag by Quartz Zero has its own printable spring, and you can even sub out the screws for some welded filament. Up top is the adjustable blaster optic by T-Man, and it is, sure enough, adjustable on elevation and windage. All you need is more PLA and some dental floss to form the crosshairs. Even the little bar that keeps it on the picatinny rail is 3D-printed. The secret sauce is the Morocco is a stringer, not a springer. Instead of using high-pressure air and a high-powered spring, it physically flicks the darts out the barrel like a medieval crossbow. That also makes it weaker than most 3D-printed homemades, but it's the perfect power for plinking paper paraphernalia without possibly punching pockmarks in the plaster. It also looks f***ing magical in Cookie Cad's new Fairy Floss filament. If you like any of the stuff you see, I've linked all the filaments and all the models in the description, and I indicated which filaments, like these, I was given for free. Sorry, Polymaker, you ended up promoting the competition. So what if your wimpy T-Rex noodle arms are too feeble to shake your Morocco? Cookie Cad's got you covered with a model so intensely goofy, it wraps back around to being smart, and I'm genuinely angry I didn't think of it first. This is a real workout. Nathan the Cookie Cad guy personally designed this dumbass dumbbell that transforms spools of filament into cartoonishly huge gym weights, so you can get cartoonishly small. This was meant as a photo op for Cookie Cad's booth, so the tines are obviously sized to lock into Cookie Cad's real central tourney-hole-spoke-things-technical-term. If you haven't yet pledged loyalty to the Cookie Clan, it will also fit Anchormake, Ninja Tech, and many more, like this ancient MakerBot ABS I got at Polar Filament Filament Story Swap Meet. I dumped the revolting remnants of my cursed filaments episode and grabbed some sh** so sh**y they rounded it up to 1.8 millimeters. MakerBot, not Cookie Cad. Cookie Cad's got that sh** a lot. Also, you can screw more filament holders onto the filament holders, so place your bets, people. Which is going to give out first, my bicep or the handle? You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like. That was a stupid waste of time and filament, so let's devote our limited resources to a more sensible end. Putting PEZ dispensers on your gridfinity. I was just f***ing with you, next one's even stupider. PEZfinity was created by Twitch streamer PEZliz, who also designed and gave me this PEZ tiara. She likes PEZ, alright? In my Mind Blowing Prints episode, I built a candy gat that used these things as magazines, but that left me with 9 spare My Little Pony PEZ dispensers, and I was going to throw them out. But now they're on a 42mm grid, and I consider anything on a 42mm grid to be sacred. It's my regridgen. I'm having trouble coming up with a better name than gridfinitarianism, so please leave your ecclesiastical suggestions in the comments. So, um, yeah, if you got some PEZ dispensers and some gridfinity, and you want to put the PEZ dispensers on the gridfinity, PEZliz got you covered with PEZfinity. You can't the tiara, though. As far as I know, she never shared it. Heavy is the head that wears the PEZ crown. Did we lose those party poopers who keep nagging me to stop printing idiotic crap and do something useful? Because I got a reputation to uphold, and our next print is going to change the world, and it's based as f**k. This is fellow YouTuber 3DPrinty, and I've featured at least one of his well-designed, maker-friendly models in pretty much every printable project roundup, but the one he put front and center on his Urmurf booth was something truly special. If you have trouble seeing, the 3x2 grid of raised dots called Braille lets your fingers do the reading. But Braille handwriting has to be painstakingly embossed dot by dot with a pointy stick on a special slate, backwards and upside down. Those are not ideal learning conditions. So everyone who learns Braille needs a special device like this one. Each of these dots manually clicks in and out so new readers and writers can practice without having to lug around a clunky typewriter or mess around with a backwards pokey stick. It's also like a thousand dollars, and that is a truly eye-popping price, or if you really need it, a finger-popping price. 3DPrinty's Braille training cell does the exact same thing, possibly better, for like 70 cents of filament. What truly rules about this project, apart from, you know, letting blind children learn to read if they don't happen to have a thousand f***ing dollars lying around. 3DPrinty's version is like the greatest fidget toy ever developed. These dots crisply snap to attention and press down flush, and they stay put even under the most aggressive reading. I have never put those words together before. The mechanism that gives these such a smooth, satisfying click is nothing. This frame is a single solid chunk of semi-flexible TPU, and the dots might look like delicious orange Tic Tacs, but they're just PLA pegs. The trick is this little ridge in each hole. It catches notches on the peg, which snaps it into one of two positions, and prevents a forceful writer from, like, popping it all the way through. Mr. Printy, if that is his real name, originally designed this complex leaf spring buckling doohickey, but once an actual Braille user got their hands on it, it turned out to be useless. This is Reese on the channel Filament Stories, and she'll be the first to tell you. If you want to She immediately recognized depressing a dot took way too much force, and if you're a kid doing the Braille equivalent of writing your name a hundred times, that finger fatigue is gonna add up. As Reese and Printy refined the design, Reese's mom Courtney hunted down the perfect material, 92ATPU. It's still a rigid material, but it's also quite flexible, the perfect balance between tactile feedback and finger crossfit. Just be careful. If you fidget too much and you leave this thing lying around, you may unwittingly teach a vision-impaired child some filthy cussing, and then they'll have to wash their hands with soap. 3D Printy released the Braille training cell as straight-up public domain. That means you can do literally anything you want with it. Make it, mod it, sell it, claim you invented it, print it in chocolate, no permission, no cost, no nothing, forever. This accessibility device will always remain accessible. Kind of a shitty accessibility device if it's inaccessible, isn't it? But no matter how many eyes you're currently using, and how well they currently work, feast them on this. This incredible signage is 100% 3D printed, or 300% deprinted. That is the quality rating you get in every episode of Voidstar Lab. Like, comment, subscribe. Joel the 3D printing nerd and his posse built one of those carnival strength testers, like, where you hit the thing with a hammer and see how strong you are. I never got a chance, because somebody destroyed the strength tester by hitting it with a hammer. But we're not talking about the game. We're talking about the scoreboard. These eye-shreddingly garish nameplates were generated in Hueforge, a piece of software that renders full-color pictures into 3D printable full-color pictures. This is a paid program, but to their credit, it's just a one-time fee, no bullshit subscriptions, and it is a lot more advanced than ye olde lithophane generator. Hueforge actually blends the filament's colors by stacking layers so thin they act like filters, but if you want to get the best results, it needs accurate measurements of color and transmissivity, or how far light can penetrate before it gets completely blocked. Neither value is easy to measure, so getting prints this juicy takes some guesswork. Till now, because of this, the next thing that we're going to be talking about on this episode, where we look at cool things that you can make, and you can make this, this thing that we're going to be talking about in this section right now. This is it, this is the thing, the TD-1 by Ajax3D. This is a filament color analyzer so thoughtfully conceived and so seamlessly executed, I don't have anything to criticize about it. I am completely unmoored from the world I thought I knew, adrift in a foggy sea of uncertainty. Hold me. This little guy was given to me pre-assembled by Ajax3D himself, but the whole thing is open source, the bill of materials is just commodity parts, the instructions are well written, they're fully illustrated, and most importantly, they are not a video. I cannot stand when the instructions are only a video. You don't need any drivers, or setup, or anything. You just start up Hueforge, plug in the TD-1, and insert filament into the filament insertion hole. A dialog box automatically pops up, pre-populated with color and transmissivity, so you just type in the make and model, hit OK, and shove in the next one. It only took me like 15 minutes to capture every single PLA in my closet. Unfortunately, I didn't really have enough colors to get great results. Like, I have a lot of different filaments, but they're all different filaments. I've shown nearly 150 of them in my Every Single Filament series, and since the last installment, I've snagged over a hundred more. I just keep finding new ones, and that episode just keeps growing faster than I can write it, and I am starting to get more than a little bit worried. Point is, I have an anxiety problem, and I also have a lot of filaments. I'm pretty sure I have the most anxiety, but I certainly do not have the most filaments. Tucked in the furthest corner of URMURF, I met the man who does. The majordomo of filamentcolors.xyz, the self-proclaimed filament librarian. Oh, also, I forgot to, like, finish that last part. If you haven't used Hueforge, you should really download it, because it rules. This living legend has set out to catalog every filament in every color, in every meaning of the word every. Armed with self-made hardware, software, and a server backend, he's indexed over 1,300 swatches with another 300 in the inbox. The librarian's database includes things like Pantone color matching, filament substitutes, and because it's all fuzzy searchable, it's really easy to find what you're looking for. As I shoved filament after filament into the TD-1, I decided to print two birds with one stone-filled PLA. I decided to send the filament librarian every single filament from every single filament video. So if you find a hole in the librarian's extensive database, you can make a donation. Just snap off a couple meters, shove it in a Ziploc bag, and print one of his standard labels. In two dimensions. The total dimensions in Voidstar Lab are no longer divisible by three, and that really bothers me for some reason. The filament librarian can even pick up the postage. I sent him $169 Kofi to replenish the shipping fund. All the links are in the description, and if you'd like to print the same swatches for yourself, I linked those too. But please, do not send printed swatches to El Bibliotecario de Filamentos. In order to keep everything consistent, he has to print all the swatches himself. So I actually failed in this mission. I barely managed to pack a hundred new filaments before I ran the entire house out of Ziploc baggies. The project after our next project is the final project, but we need the next project to make the final project funny. So next is a specialized measuring instrument for visually documenting objects of unusual and or ambiguous dimensional magnitude. As its operation is familiar to specialists and laypeople alike, this tool constitutes a convenient yet broadly accessible reference to establish the scale of a juxtaposed item. That said, any metrologist worth their micrometer will decry its lack of precision, its tragically short service life, and the significant slipping hazard posed by its enclosure. Perhaps most damning, its fabrication requires such significant resources, it's led to the establishment and exploitation of entire republics. Well, no more! This is the Imperial Scaling Banana by SMC. It is a dimensionally accurate reproduction which adds major and minor graduations and can be implemented on nearly any consumer-grade additive manufacturing device. To eliminate wasteful support material, I borrowed a technique from the frozen dessert sector and bisected the instrument lengthwise. Those with access to a multi-material printer can even paint the marks contrasting color for maximum legibility and verisimilitude. I went to a show with Voron's first CNC, a robot arm playing tug-of-war, and a collapsible sub-miniature printer with an inverted glass build plate heated by coils of crystal clear indium tin oxide, and I chose to feature the plastic banana. What can I say? This kind of thing appeals to me. Was that side-splitting? Cause I got a bunch of these. Ripe then, it's plain-tained to see I've slipped off script and made a potassi of myself. Enough monkeying around. Our final project from the second Rocky Mountain RepRap Fest is an entire printer. I will now deploy the banana, revealing this printer to be a cutie patootie. This is the Baby Belt Pro by Rob Mink, and I did not get very much on-site footage of it. This short king was thoroughly overshadowed by machines much larger, flashier, and pricier, and I think that's a shame. Belt printers are still a rarity in 2024, yet Rob has single-handedly designed ones so affordable, and so easy to build, even I made one. If you've been in this hobby for a while, you probably have most of the parts needed to build one already. Like, the hotend is just a Revo or bamboo heater, the extruder is anything that bolts onto a NEMA 17, and the heated bed is optional. Anything you can't salvage, you can find on Amazon. You print this whole frame in PLA in less than a day, with barely any support. Belt printers might look wacky, but they're basically old-school fixed-gantry machines like the Replicator 2. The X-axis carries the Y-axis, which carries the extruder, and the build surface advances when each layer is done. A belt printer just tilts the gantry 45 degrees to let it run the bed sideways instead of lifting and lowering. This has all kinds of weird implications. It doesn't need any lead screws, there's only a single axis to level, and it can print models of any length, as long as there's something to prop up the workpiece once it becomes longer than the printer itself. The Z-axis never needs calibration at all, because it's a loop of fabric with unicorns on it. The Babybelt prints PLA directly onto cotton. It's like the same technique we used to make a t-shirt in my Cursed Prints episode, except it's actually, you know, useful. Things developed for stupid purposes can be used for smart purposes. Imagine that! The trick is there's an extra-long, heat-activated, iron-on patch applied to the wrong side of the fabric. This gives the roller something to grip, it limits how far molten filament can penetrate into the fibers, and it joins the fabric end-to-end with no lumpy stitches to mar the bottom surface. When the job's done, you just run the belt till this ramp scrapes the print free. Since it can fully reset itself, a belt printer can autonomously crank out job after job till it runs out of filament. Theoretically. The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory, and in practice, I can never really get my BBP, which I named the Scorzer's Apprentice, to finish a very accurate print. The x-axis was just a little bit off, and it would occasionally skip steps and shift layers. I even cranked the current and piled on some heatsinks, but, you know, still had this issue. Leave a comment if you know which video this heatsink originally appeared in. You won't. The Baby Belt's creator, Rob, was very responsive on the Baby Belt Discord, and he helped me narrow it down to these linear bearings. To bolt down the x-axis, I had to grip their nuts from behind at an awkward angle, as one does, so the rails went askew and it jacked up the friction. That's apparently not compatible with these itty-bitty teeny-weeny NEMA11 motors. Look how f***ing adorable these motors are. I love them. I'm still showing off the Baby Belt Pro, because if you make it yourself, your build will almost certainly run better than mine. Literally the day after I applied the finishing touches, Rob posted version 2, which refines almost every part, including a complete overhaul of the x-axis that makes it far easier to square everything up. And while the instructions are pretty rough, they are not a video, which immediately makes them fine. I really hate video instructions. The truth is, this thing is way, way simpler than it looks, and I wasted a lot of time squinting at the manual when common sense was screaming the answer in my ear. So yeah, the Baby Belt Pro is not going to be your next daily driver, but it is perfect for what it is. A cheap, fun toy that lets you tinker with an otherwise inaccessible style of printer. I originally meant to feature one more object of interest, and it's something people drove literal days to wait in line just to get a photo with. Talking about me! URMORF was an awesome chance to finally meet some fans and see the awesome projects they're working on in real life. Like this woodblock mountain is actually a functional QR code. I linked up with Grant Posner, aka 3D Musketeers, check out his channel too, and he used a $35,000 3D scanner to capture my every polygon, so the original plan was you would be able to take me home. Platonically. We also scanned Christopher the voice-activated quagsire in this blahai. The results were unfortunately not ready in time for this episode, and I'm not sure if it's going to get its own. No matter what, I'm definitely going to share the results and the process with the fine folks who support me on Patreon. The only reason I can even push pause on the content creation death march long enough to do stuff like URMORF is because our patrons rule. Every episode, I pick and then I thank three random supporters in the Lab Scientist tier, and today the Royal Wee Salutes Alexandru Callan, Michael Mrocek, and Dingle Drinker of Baja Blast. Our extraordinarily generous collaborators include The Suits Ruined Our Fun, Chuck Me Harder Baby, Bit Rot, Phil McCaffrey, Turner's A, Microwave, Schleppi the Schwagster, ZomboDB, The Benevolent Misanthrope, SXP, and Scott Rennie. As always, I've made the permanent parts of the workshop and hidden their names somewhere in an easter egg. You can find it, I believe in you. Before we thank our Lab Assistant supporters, I have an unfortunate but necessary announcement. I promise to thank every Lab Assistant in every episode, but the credits are starting to take so long, viewer retention is dropping to dangerous levels. This is one of the most important metrics in the YouTube algorithm, and if the numbers trend too low, they will stop recommending my videos and effectively kill the channel. This is a privileged problem to have, and it's not one I want to solve, but people only see my videos when an inhuman profit-maxing algorithm decides to show them. I decided to compromise. Starting next episode, I am reducing Lab Assistant credits to less than 10% of the video's runtime by abbreviating long names and skipping random ones I've already thanked multiple times. All Lab Assistants will always get shown on screen, and will always get shouted out at least once. I truly depend on your support, and I appreciate all of it, no matter the tier, and if you feel shortchanged for any reason, please DM me for a full refund, no questions asked. This will take effect next video, so for the last time, prepare for the barely-abridged, mildly-censored Director's Cut. 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Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the future.