3d print

129 Articles

Electroplating 3D Prints Without Requiring A Big Vat

May 18, 2026 by 21 Comments

Electroplating 3D prints is a good way to get a pretty nice coating on even a basic PLA part, but generally you’re expected to dunk the entire part into a big vat with electrolyte after coating it with the requisite conductive paint layer. This is great for small parts, like a ring you’d put on a finger, but gets rather silly when it’s a much larger part, such as the one in [Hendrik]’s recent video. Out of curiosity he tried to see whether rotating the part through a much smaller vat would still get you an even coating, or not.

Perhaps ironically this process required building a custom vat out of acrylic, as well as an entire rig to hold up the part and gently rotate it. This highlights the main disadvantage of this approach, in that unless you’re doing a small production run or otherwise get to re-use the rig a lot it’s a lot of extra effort.

That said, the rotation is controlled by an ESP32 and a stepper motor along with a requisite stepper driver, with the most exotic part being the whole custom PCB and enclosure, all of which can be used repeatedly. With all of that tested and confirmed working, the part to be plated was sanded, sprayed with conductive paint and hooked up to the rotating rig for an overnight run.

Following that the part’s new copper coating was polished before more layers of electroplating were applied to get the desired two different colors from different metals. Along the way no issues were found with this method of rotating electroplating, so if you regularly struggle with oversized parts to electroplate, this would seem to be a viable method.

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What a punch card looks like to openCV

21st Century Punch Cards Are 3D Printed And Read By OpenCV

May 16, 2026 by 14 Comments

While a punch card is perhaps the lowest-density storage medium available, it has some distinct advantages. As [Bitroller] points out in the write-up of his punch card project, if he was using stainless steel instead of PLA his 3D printed punch cards would likely outlast everything he owns, and survive a five-alarm fire to boot. If you have 16 bytes you really, really don’t want to forget — or are willing to store your private key in a shoe box — this project might be of interest.

The nice part is that he’s built a handy Python script to generate printable files for the punch cards, which encode 16 bytes of information and 4 bytes of error correction using the Reed-Solomon algorithm. That’s just enough for a password and the error correction means up to two bytes can be recovered in the case of read failure.

The reading is where this gets interesting — again, [Bitroller] provides a handy script, but this one uses OpenCV to read the entire punch card at once from a webcam image, using the contrast between a black table and the light-colored PLA cards. It’s massively overkill and would have needed a supercomputer in the days when punch cards were common I/O, but that’s what makes this a great hack.

We only have one quibble: if you use additive manufacturing, can you still call it a punch card? Nothing was punched out, after all.

If you think punch cards are totally irrelevant in the modern day, well, you might be right– but that doesn’t stop us from playing with them. If punch cards make you think of Big Iron in the early days of computing, maybe think further back– they were used for everything from Jacquard looms to the original MIDI.

3D Printed Jack Mixes Two Filaments For Great Performance

February 17, 2026 by 12 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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A wooden frame is shown with a scale pulling down on a 3D-printed part held in the frame. A phone on a stand is taking video of the part.

Changing Print Layer Patterns To Increase Strength

January 31, 2026 by 3 Comments

Dy default, the slicing software used for 3D printers has the printer first create the walls around the edges of a print, then goes back to deposit the infill pattern. [NeedItMakeIt], however, experimented with a different approach to line placement, and found significant strength improvements for some filaments.

The problem, as [NeedItMakeIt] identified with a thermal camera, is that laying down walls around a print gives the extruded plastic time to cool of. This means new plastic is being deposited onto an already-cooled surface, which reduces bonding strength. Instead, he used an aligned rectilinear fill pattern to print the solid parts. In this pattern, the printer is usually extruding filament right next to the filament it just deposited, which is still hot and therefore adheres better. The extrusion pattern is also aligned vertically, which might improve inter-layer bonding at the transition point.

To try it out, he printed a lever-type test piece, then recorded the amount of force it took to break a column free from the base. He tried it with a default fill pattern, aligned fill, and aligned fill with a single wall around the outside, and printed copies in PLA, plain PETG, and carbon fiber-reinforced PETG. He found that aligned fill improved strength in PLA and carbon fiber PETG, in both cases by about 46%, but led to worse performance in plain PETG. Strangely, the aligned fill with a single outside wall performed better than default for PLA, but worse than default in both forms of PETG. The takeaway seems to be that aligned fill improves layer adhesion when it’s lacking, but when adhesion is already good, as with PETG, it’s a weaker pattern overall.

Interesting, [MakeItPrintIt]’s test results fit in well with previous testing that found carbon fiber makes prints weaker. Another way to get stronger print fill patterns is with brick layers.

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A giant pokeball is the best place to hide this holiday season.

Our New Years Wish Is To Hide In A Giant Pokéball

January 1, 2026 by 7 Comments

Between the news, the world situation, and the inevitable family stresses that come this time of year, well — one could be excused for feeling a certain amount of envy for those adorable pocket monsters who spend their time hidden away in red-and-white orbs. [carlos3dprint] evidently did, but he didn’t just dream of cozy concave solitude: he made it happen, with 3D printing and way too much post-processing.

Arguably 3D printing is not the ideal technique for such a large build, and even [carlos], despite the 3dprint in his handle, recognized this: the base frame of the sphere is CNC-routed plywood. He tried to use Styrofoam to make a skin, but evidently he’d lost access to the large CNC cutter he’d borrowed for the plywood frame at that point, as he was trying to do the cuts by hand. It still seems like it wouldn’t have be any worse than the little printed blocks from four different printers he eventually hot-stapled into a shell.

We only say that because based on his description of how much resin and filler went into creating a smooth outer surface on his Pokéball, the raw surface of the prints must have been pretty bad before fiberglass was applied. Still, it’s hard to argue with results, and the results are smooth, shiny and beautiful after all the sanding and painting. Could another technique have been easier? Maybe, but we hack with what we have, and [carlos] had 3D printers and knows how to make the best of them.

The interior of the ball is just large enough for a cozy little gaming nook, and no guesses what [carlos] is playing inside. The Instructable linked above doesn’t have many interior photos, though, so you’ll have to check the video (embedded below) for the interior fitting out, or jump to the tour at about the 15 minute mark.

Given ongoing concerns about VOCs from 3D printers, we kind of hope the Bulbsaur-themed printer he’s got in there is decorative, but it’s sure a nice homage to the construction method. Other pokeballs featured on Hackaday have been much smaller, but we’ve always had a soft spot for scaled-up projects.

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Disposable Camera Viewfinder Becomes 3D Printed Lens

December 24, 2025 by 10 Comments

Disposable cameras are a fun way to get into classical photography. However, they can also be a valuable source of interesting parts that can be put to other uses. For example, as [Billt] demonstrates, their viewfinders can be repurposed into a rather interesting lens for more serious cameras.

[Billt] was lucky enough to score a grabbag of used disposable cameras from a local film lab, and tore them down for parts. He was particularly interested in the viewfinders, since Kodak equipped its disposable cameras with actual plastic lenses for this very purpose.

[Billt] wanted to see what these lenses would do when thrown on the front of a proper digital camera, and set about designing a mount for that purpose. The 3D printed part was designed to mount one of the viewfinder lens assemblies on the front of any Sony E-mount camera. In a rather nifty trick, [Billt] realized the lens assembly could be installed in the adapter by pausing mid-way through the 3D print to drop it in. The only unfortunate thing? The lenses didn’t really work, and all the camera could see was a haze of unfocused light.

With the aid of some cardboard experiments, [Billt] decided to make some changes. The front element of the viewfinder was dumped, with the rear element being used solo instead. This was fitted to the adapter on a simple slide mechanism so that focus could be reliably adjusted. With these changes, the lens came good, and provided some really interesting shots. It’s quite a cropped lens and it can achieve a very close focus distance, as little as 1 inch in testing. It’s quite sharp in the center of the image, while softly blurring out towards the edges—something that sounds very familiar if you’ve used one of these disposable cameras in the wild.

Sometimes it’s fun to grab a random piece of junk to see if you can turn it into something good. Video after the break.

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The Water-Cooled PS3 Sony Never Made

November 6, 2025 by 3 Comments

The Playstation 3 had a dizzying number of variants from its first launch in 2006 to when they stopped selling the slim models over a decade later in 2017. Of all those, you’ve probably never heard of the water-cooled Playstation 3 Pro, for the simple reason that it did not exist until [Zac] of Zac Builds created it in a video to push the limits of the now-vintage hardware.

This hack isn’t totally unique; you used to be able to buy watercooling kits for the PS3, but like the console itself, those have long since left the market. Of course [Zac] is hacking this Playstation 3 in 2025, so he’s doing it in a very modern way: with 3D scanning and CNC machining.

After very, very carefully removing the heat spreaders from the CPU and GPU to replace the dried out thermal paste, [Zac] scans the main board to design mounts for the dual waterblocks. Those mounts are, of course, 3D printed in carbon fibre reinforced nylon. Since the mount is going to be under pressure and rather warm, he anneals the nylon for 24 hours at 85 degrees. 3D printing also comes into play mount the pump and radiator into a handsome case that nearly looks like something Sony could have put out back in the day. That whole workflow seems normal today, but would have been borderline science-fiction with the console was new. .

Note that this is not a 2007 unit. [Zac] picked the newest PS3 he could that was still hackable–each revision got more efficient as the chips moved to smaller architectures, but Sony did eventually lock down the firmware to prevent overclocking. Which is of course the point here: since the stock hardware leaves a lot on the table in terms of thermal management, [Zac] figured there would be great performance boosts available.

As it happens, [Zac] was right about performance boosts– on GPU limited titles, he’s getting upto 50% higher frame rates. (Which makes sense, given he’s overclocking the GPU by about 50%.) Loading times are also much improved with the inevitable HDD to SSD swap.

The last time we featured a watercooled playstation hack was back in 2011, for a PS3 laptop of all things. The modern workflow makes it much easier. It’s been a few years since we last posted a Playstation 3 hack. Perhaps now, as they age into becoming “retro” we’ll see a revival in that category.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip, via Yanko Design, which seems to provide an LLM-assisted (or generated) summary of [Zac]’s video.

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