Piano Escapement Migrates To Drum Kit

June 29, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

For as popular as the piano is in music studios, homes, and schools, it almost defies logic. Compared to a guitar, harmonica, or drum set, pianos are incredibly complex machines that can have somewhere on the order of 8,000 moving parts in a case that can easily weigh hundreds of pounds and which often responds quite poorly to seasonal changes in temperature and humidity. But for putting up with all of these downsides, musicians are rewarded with an instrument that uniquely responds to touch, style, and emotion. A big reason for that is that mechanical complexity, and [Super Valid Designs] is attempting to bring that design to a drum set.

Compared to the complex machinery that connects the movement of a piano’s key to its hammer striking a string, a kick drum pedal is much simpler. It can only bounce off of the drum or get “buried” where the beater remains pressed up against the drum after hitting it. [Super Valid Designs] wanted something with a bit more finesse and control, so he first 3D printed a mechanism that throws the beater towards the drum head and then disconnects it mechanically from the pedal, so that it rebounds even if the pedal stays depressed. The next steps were more difficult, which involved making sure the mechanism reset itself in a repeatable way, without making too much noise of its own. This involved trying out a few different ideas and printing a massive amount of subtly different linkages, but in the end he’s left with a machine that nearly replicates all of the parts of a piano’s escapement,

The end goal of this project wasn’t simply to reproduce piano mechanisms on a drum set, though. [Super Valid Designs] hopes to make a kick drum that’s much smaller than those found in traditional kits, and since smaller drums respond poorly when the beater remains on or near the drum after striking it, a mechanism like this will dramatically improve the performance of the smaller drum and help reduce the requirement for perfect technique. And, maybe in 50 years or so, these types of escapements will take over the drumming world just like the piano escapement took over keyboards after its invention in the 1700s. Some simpler piano actions have been built before, but the complexity seems to be a requirement for all of the tasks they need to do whether its for a piano or a drum.

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Ergonomic Mouse Gives Each Fingertip Its Own Saddle

June 15, 2026 by Donald Papp 5 Comments

Want to make your own ergonomic mouse but don’t know where to start? Why not try [psudoku]’s Kotinos design?

It’s a scaffold-like fingertip shell that uses the internals of an HSK Pro mouse. Each fingertip gets its own little saddle-shaped nook, and things like hand size and paddle surface can all be configured by modifying the OpenSCAD scripts.

[psudoku]’s unit looks to us as though it was maybe made using multi-jet fusion (MJF) 3D printing, but it should be perfectly printable on hobbyist printers, whether resin- or filament-based.

Comfort of the contact surfaces is left up to the end user, but if your print lacks smoothness and sanding isn’t your jam, you might consider a layer of fabric tape to create a velvet-like surface on a 3D print. That’s a trick we’ve kept in mind ever since seeing it put to good use, cushioning the hardware in a DIY steam deck case.

Is the minimalist scaffold approach to a mouse not your style, or does your hand crave something less lightweight but a little more personalized? You might want to craft a truly custom-fitted mouse, for which clay is the way.

Downloadable Xbox Thumbstick Toppers Give Gamers Accessibility Options

June 15, 2026 by Donald Papp No comments

Microsoft has a history of taking accessibility options seriously for gaming controllers, and that trend continues with downloadable thumbstick toppers for Xbox controllers. Being straight from the source, the 3D models should fit as well as can be expected with a minimum of fiddling. Just make sure you select the right controller model, because they are each subtly different.

The toppers themselves come in different styles, and there’s a design to fit a variety of needs, from a thumb cradle to ones intended for more serious adaptations — the perforated X-shaped topper, for instance, is meant to anchor a custom shape molded overtop it.

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Adding Weight To A 3D Print With Plaster Of Paris, Cleanly

June 12, 2026 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

Sometimes it’s useful to add extra mass to a 3D print, and [Joe Fedewa] shared a simple and effective technique that uses plaster of Paris. Rather than pause the print and insert hardware or weighted bits inside, he designed the base as hollow. Not in the sense of zero infill, but in the sense of modeling a cavity into the open bottom of the object.

An open cavity in the base is perfect for filling with plaster of Paris.

After the print is complete, he mixes the dry plaster with water until it creates a thick but pourable mixture. Then the object gets turned upside-down and the cavity filled. In about an hour, it will have set up enough to be handled and worked.

Plaster of Paris has a good heft to it, but more importantly it can be made perfectly presentable thanks to being very friendly to post-processing. Any rough spots can be easily sanded and the whole bottom smoothed, so one doesn’t even need to cap it off. Completely cured plaster can be sealed with a clear coat for a more durable finish, if desired.

This basic concept has been used in other ways, such as reinforcing prints with concrete to yield parts solid enough to make tools out of. But using plaster of Paris not just to add mass, but specifically to create a presentable surface that doesn’t need covering up is a neat and highly economical adaptation of the idea.

Other methods of adding mass to a 3D print include inserting metal balls or chunky nuts, bolts, or other hardware, but this method doesn’t require pausing prints to insert things. Nor does it require sealing off or capping the print, messing with goopy epoxies or resins, or spending a lot of money — making it a good one to keep in mind in case it comes in handy someday.

Glue-in Hinge Design Tries Something Different

June 12, 2026 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

Need a hinge in your 3D printed design and would prefer not to re-invent the wheel? You may find [Alex Krush]’s glue-in filament hinge useful.

This design (shown in this simple box as an example) makes a very close-fitting hinge point.

This design prints half the hinge as a separate piece — the u-shaped one in the picture to the side — that must be glued into the target object after printing. It’s a bit of extra work, but doing it this way has a couple advantages.

One is that printing some of the hinge elements separately means one no longer needs to choose between a print orientation that best suits the object, and a print orientation that works best for the hinge. Also, the length of 1.75 mm filament used as a hinge pin is held captive after assembly so there’s no need to glue the hinge pin itself.

[Alex] helpfully provides the parts in STEP format, which makes CAD tweaks and adjustments easy. While incorporating the design should be doable even if one is just using .stl or .3mf files because boolean subtraction and merging is all that’s needed, having the model in STEP format is so much better.

Should you need some pointers on incorporating either into FreeCAD, we have you covered.

A small, orange 3D printer is shown on a desk with a filament dry box. The printer is printing a waving cat figurine. The printer is a CoreXY configuration, and the side panels are 3D-printed orange plastic.

3D Printing A Miniature CoreXY Printer

June 6, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 7 Comments

Although no longer so common as during the heyday of the RepRap movement, it’s easier than ever to build your own largely-printed 3D printer, with designs such as Voron’s delivering excellent quality. Nevertheless, there are still niches to be filled by new designs, such as [Alex Yu]’s mostly-printed Encore design.

The Encore uses CoreXY kinematics and linear rails for the X and Y axes. Its has no internal frame; the linear rails are mounted directly to the side panels, which were printed but provided sufficient rigidity. The printer is modular, and all the parts are designed to fit within a 225 mm print bed. The Encore itself uses a 120 mm bed, a Bowden extruder, and a lightweight Bambu-style hotend. The drive motors are NEMA 17 stepper motors, and they use sliding mounts for belt tensioning. The power supply sits behind the rods supporting the Z axis, and the controller board is in the base of the printer.

Building the printer was simple; tuning it, less so. The combination of a Bambu-type hotend with a Bowden extruder created some complications, and the hotend initially received too little cooling. [Alex] solved the cooling issues by using a stronger fan on the hotend, redesigning the ventilation shroud, and adding two inward-blowing fans along the sides of the build volume. After correcting some issues with Z-axis stability, the Encore produced some quite good-looking parts. [Alex] is still improving and documenting some aspects of the printer, but he’s uploaded his progress so far to GitHub.

We’ve seen some mostly-printed printers before, including a high-speed printer, one which printed all structural components, and one which was entirely 3D printed.

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Like A Wire Bender, But For Pop Tubes

June 1, 2026 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

Are you familiar with pop tubes? Resembling the corrugated section of a bendy straw, they are at the core of PopTuber, an intriguing research project from the Actuated Experience Lab at the University of Chicago.

With five motors and specialized gears a pop tube can be formed into complex, arbitrary shapes, and just as easily reset.

PopTuber shows how five motors and some specialized gears are all it takes to bend pop tubes into complex and stable 3D shapes. One can design the shapes in software, feed a pop tube into the shaper, and watch the device do the work. Importantly, the device can just as easily reset and re-use the tube. Watch the video (embedded below the page break) to see it in action and get a feel for what it can do.

In concept, it’s a little like a wire-bending machine, although wire benders are bulkier in comparison, more complex to scale, and unbending a wire is a separate process with its own hardware.

This project explores possibilities for a machine that can crank out complex curves on demand, such as oddball user interfaces, physical prototyping, and even a strange sort of physical display. But the real forward-thinking and interesting question researchers asked is whether this idea could be a form of programmable matter. The project shows that five actuators in a relatively compact package are all that’s needed to shape (and reset) a pop tube of arbitrary length in a programmable way, and it can scale easily to different sizes.

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