Thermoforming Printed Parts With Hot Water

February 19, 2026 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Thermoforming is the process of softening a material enough so that it can be tweaked into a new shape, with the source of the thermal energy being not particularly relevant. Correspondingly, after [Zion Brock]’s recent video on his journey into thermoforming PLA with a mold and a heat gun, he got many comments suggesting that he should use hot water instead.

We covered his previous video as well, in which he goes through the design steps of making these grilles for a retro-styled, 3D printed radio. The thermoforming method enables him to shape the curvy grille with a heat gun and two-piece mold in a matter of minutes, rather than spending hours more time printing and removing many supports.

Theoretically using hot water instead of hot air would provide a more equal application of heat, but putting your hands into 70°C water does require some more precautions. There’s also the issue that PLA is very hygroscopic, so the part requires drying afterwards to prevent accelerated hydrolysis. Due to the more even heating, the edge of the PLA that clamped into the mold also softened significantly, causing it to pop out of the mold and requiring a small design modification to prevent this.

Basically, aqua-thermoforming like this has many advantages, as its slower and more consistent, but it’s less straightforward to use than hot air. This makes both a useful tool when you’re looking at doing thermoforming.

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3D Printed Jack Mixes Two Filaments For Great Performance

February 17, 2026 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

If you’re looking to jack up your car and you don’t have anything on hand, your 3D printer might not be the first tool you look towards. With that said, [Alan Reiner] had great success with a simple idea to create a surprisingly capable scissor jack with a multi-material print.

The design will look familiar if you’ve ever pulled the standard jack out of the back of your car. However, this one isn’t made fully out of steel. It relies on an M6 bolt and a rivet nut, but everything else is pure plastic. In this scissor jack design, rigid PETG arms are held in a scissor jack shape with a flexible TPU outer layer. Combined with the screw mechanism, it’s capable of delivering up to 400 pounds of force without failing. It’s an impressive figure for something made out of 80 grams of plastic. The idea came about because of [Alan’s] recent build of a RatRig VCore4 printer, which has independent dual extruders. This allowed the creation of single prints with both rigid and flexible filaments included.

[Alan] did test the jack by lifting up his vehicle, which it kind of achieved. The biggest problem was the short stroke length, which meant it could only raise the back of the car by a couple inches. Printing a larger version could make it a lot more practical for actual use… if you’re willing to trust a 3D-printed device in such use.

Files are on Printables if you wish to make your own. It’s worth paying attention to the warning upfront that [Alan] provides—”THIS CAN CREATE A LOT OF FORCE (400+ lbs!), WHICH MEANS IT CAN STORE A LOT OF ENERGY THAT MIGHT BE RELEASED SUDDENLY. Please be cautious using 3d-printed objects for high loads and wear appropriate safety equipment!”

Funnily enough, we’ve featured 3D printed jacks before, all the way back in 2015! Video after the break.

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MyMiniFactory Has Acquired Thingiverse Bringing Anti-AI Focus

February 13, 2026 by Maya Posch 37 Comments

One of the best parts of 3D printing is that you can freely download the plans for countless models from sites like Thingiverse, Printables, and others. Yet with the veritable flood of models on these sites you also want to have some level of quality. Here recent news pertaining to Thingiverse is probably rather joyful, as with the acquisition of Thingiverse by MyMiniFactory, it should remain one of the most friendly sites for sharing 3D printing models.

Although Thingiverse as a concept probably doesn’t need much introduction, it’s important here to acknowledge the tumultuous times that it has gone through since its launch in 2008 as part of MakerBot. Both were acquired by Stratasys in 2013, and this has led to ups and downs in the relationship with Thingiverse’s user base.

MyMiniFactory was launched in 2013 as a similar kind of 3D printing object-sharing platform as Thingiverse, while also offering crowdsourcing and paid model options. In the MyMiniFactory blog post it’s stated that these features will not be added to Thingiverse, and that nothing should change for Thingiverse users in this regard.

What does change is its joining of the ‘SoulCrafted‘ initiative, which is an initiative against machine-generated content, including so-called ‘AI slop’. There will be a live Q & A on February 17th during which the community can pitch their questions and ideas, along with a dedicated Thingiverse group.

Thermoforming: Shaping Curvy Grilles With No Supports

February 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Making sure the heatgun is on 'low' and gloves are on while pushing on the mold. (Credit: Zion Brock) — Making sure the heatgun is on ‘low’ and gloves are on while pushing on the mold. (Credit: Zion Brock)

Although hobbyists these days most often seem to use thermoplastics as a print-and-done material in FDM printers, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from taking things further with thermoforming. Much like forming acrylic using a hot wire or hot air, thermoplastics like PLA can be further tweaked with a similar method. This can be much less complex than 3D printing the design with supports, as demonstrated by [Zion Brock].

For this classically styled radio project the front grille was previously 3D printed with the curved shape, but to avoid an ugly edge it had to be printed with most of the grille off the print bed, requiring countless supports and hours of printing time. To get around this, [Zion] opted to print the grille flat and then thermoform its curved shape. Of course, due to the unusual shape of the grille, this required a bit more effort than e.g. a spherical form.

This is similar to what is used with sheet metal to get detailed shaped, also requiring a mold and a way to stretch the flat shape over the mold. With the flat form designed to have all the material in the right places, it was able to be printed in less than an hour in PLA and then formed with a heatgun aimed at the part while the two-section mold is slid together to create the final form.

You can find the design files and full instructions on the website for the radio project.

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Making A Hidden Door Status Sensor

February 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 29 Comments

The door sensor in its new enclosures. (Credit: Dillan Stock)

A common sight in ‘smart homes’, door sensors allow you to detect whether a door is closed or open, enabling the triggering of specific events. Unfortunately, most solutions for these sensors are relatively bulky and hard to miss, making them a bit of a eyesore. This was the case for [Dillan Stock] as well, who decided that he could definitely have a smart home, yet not have warts sticking out on every single doorframe and door. There’s also a video version of the linked blog post.

These door sensors tend to be very simple devices, usually just a magnet and a reed relay, the latter signaling a status change to the wireless transmitter or transceiver. Although [Dillan] had come across recessed door sensors before, like a Z-wave-based unit from Aeotec, this was a very poorly designed product with serious reliability issues.

That’s when [Dillan] realized that he could simply take the PCB from one of the Aqara T1 door sensors that he already had and stuff them into a similar 20 mm diameter form factor as that dodgy sensor unit. Basically this just stuffs the magnet and PCB from an existing wart-style sensor into a recessed form factor, making it a very straightforward hack, that only requires printing the housings for the Aqara T1 sensor and some intimate time between the door and a drill.

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Is That Ancient Reel Of PLA Any Good?

February 10, 2026 by Jenny List 48 Comments

When it comes to knowledge there are things you know as facts because you have experienced them yourself or had them verified by a reputable source, and there are things that you know because they are common knowledge but unverified. The former are facts, such as that a 100mm cube of water contains a litre of the stuff, while the latter are received opinions, such as the belief among Americans that British people have poor dental care. The first is a verifiable fact, while the second is subjective.

In our line there are similar received opinions, and one of them is that you shouldn’t print with old 3D printing filament because it will ruin the quality of your print. This is one I can now verify for myself, because I was recently given a part roll of blue PLA from a hackerspace, that’s over a decade old. It’s not been stored in a special environment, instead it’s survived a run of dodgy hackerspace premises with all the heat and humidity that’s normal in a slightly damp country. How will it print?

It Ain’t Stringy

In the first instance, looking at the filament, it looks like any other filament. No fading of the colour, no cracking, if I didn’t know its age it could have been opened within the last few weeks. It loads into the printer, a Prusa Mini, fine, it’s not brittle, and I’m ready to print a Benchy.

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A small plastic object can be seen in front of the tip of a hypodermic needle. The object is made of clear, slightly purple-tinted plastic. It is roughly circular, with edges thicker than the center.

The Latest From RepRapMicron – Nail Gel, First Objects, And More

February 1, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 12 Comments

We’ve been following [Vik Olliver]’s progress on the μRepRap project with interest for some time now. The project’s goal is to build a 3D printer that can print feature sizes down to about 10 microns – the same feature size used in the Intel 4004 processor. At the recent Everything Open 2026 conference, [Vik] presented an overview of all the progress he’s made in the last year, including printer improvements, material woes, and the first multi-layer prints (presentation slides).

The motion stage has undergone some fundamental improvements recently. The original XY motion table was supported on four flexures which allowed movement in X and Y, but also introduced slight variations in Z – obviously a problem in a system that needs to be accurate down to the microns. The latest version now uses complementary flexures to maintain a constant Z height, and eliminates interference between the X and Y axes. The axis motion drivers were also redesigned with parallel-bar linear reducers inspired by a pantograph, increasing their usable range from two to eight millimeters.

Rather than extruding material, the μRepRap uses an electrochemically-etched needle point to deposit UV-curable gel on the build surface. [Vik] found that a bit of nitric acid in the needle etching solution gave the edges of the probe a bit of a rough texture which let it hold more resin. He started his test prints using normal 3D printer resin, but it turns out that dissolved oxygen inhibits curing – quite a problem for small, air-exposed droplets. Fortuitously, UV nail gel does cure in air, and the next set of tests were printed in nail gel, including the first layered prints (one of which can be seen above, on top of a hypodermic needle). The μRepRap can’t yet print large numbers of layers, but [Vik] did print some hinged parts that could be folded into shape.

There’s much more in the presentation than can be covered here, including some interesting thoughts about the possibility of 3D printing electrochemical memory cells in ionic gel. Near the end of the presentation, [Vik] listed some pieces of related work, including necroprinting and this homemade micro-manipulator.