One crushing criticism that has been aimed at home 3D printing is that it has no real practical use. People who take this point of view usually claim that far from being the vanguard of a new industrial revolution home printers are actually only really used for producing deformed yoda heads. In this post I utterly refute this argument with a demonstration of a truly useful object created using my printer.
My bathroom had been plagued with rust stains on the counter caused by my shaving foam can. Living in Singapore the humidity is very high and the can starts to rust quite quickly and transfers horrible stains to the counter. Using AutoDesk 123D design I made a simple “boot” that fits snugly over the bottom of the shaving can and stops rust transfer to the counter. Rust stains are now a thing of the past, although the boot did fit a bit too snugly and ended up breaking eventually and revealing a nightmare of rustiness hidden under the plastic covering.
So there you go – the scores of man hours and hundreds of dollars spent on the printer have already paid massive dividends by removing orange rings from my bathroom.
Good work. Is the boss impressed at your usefulness?
However, I put it to you that, whilst you have captured the dripping orange-bad, the close proximity of your part to the can has increased the amount of condensation that is generating the orange-bad, thus making the overall problem worse. How do you plead?
Yes the rust is probably worse, but out of sight out of mind (unless it gets so bad the can explodes). I can live with rusty cans hidden by beautiful PLA, but not rusty rings on counter visible to wife!