I recently purchased a 3D printer. It is a Creality Ender 3 unit and is quite bare bones. Though for less than $200, it is perfect for learning more about the process and techniques required.




As any new owner of a 3D Printer, I’ve downloaded quite a few models from Thingiverse and other sites and cranked them out. There is quite a learning curve to climb when it comes to creating new models. To help with this ascent, I started playing with Tinkercad and wanted to create name plates for my team at the office. It took about 20 hours of printing, but I was successful and everyone liked their name plates.

I decided that I should also create a name plate for The Daughter. She has been a big fan of some of the 3D printed doo dads I’ve made. So I used the same approach as I did with my co-workers, creating a block, and then dragging individual letters over the block and creating a void with their shapes. Here’s her nameplate.

Looks great, right? Well, The Daughter has a particular way that she signs her name. She dots her i’s very clearly. She also punctuates her name with a period. She is 5 (and three quarters). She was not taught to do this, but its a cute quirk and I’ll miss it when its gone.

When I handed her the name plate, she looked at it and said, “Dad, where’s the period?”

What a great question! Rather than burst her bubble, she helped me properly size and align the period that I had left off and we re-printed it.

I’m still not sure why she didn’t request to add the dots above the i’s, but I’ll keep that to myself.

Thanks for reading.

Sidenote: Greetings to the handful of you that still read this blog. And thank you for not deleting your RSS subscription after 4.5 years of no new content. I truly am horribly inconsistent about adding new stuff to this here website. Expect that to continue.