3d printed replacement parts?

[superuser]

The needle brush on my Aquabot X4 broke off one of the pins that retains the brush assembly, and rather than buy a new brush assembly for ~ $40 I figured what the heck - print one! It's a simple enough design, so a few minutes in Fusion 360 and just under an hour total on the printer. We'll see how well it holds up.

 

[superuser]

Original on the left, printed on the right.

 

[the_sphynx]

That is nice. I am starting to look at 3D printers but my only use case is "cool to play around with". On rare occasion I might want to print like a small raspberry pi case or something.

 

[superuser]

My wife bought the printer as a "I don't know what to get him, but he likes gadgets" gift one year. She fully expected me to play with it for a bit and see it collect dust for a few years. Surprisingly for her, I use it a fair bit. Not quite every day, sometimes not even once in a month, but sometimes it'll stay busy for days.

After I first assembled it, I did just that - printed a few cases for Rasp. Pis and little stuff like that. But you start looking at things and your creativity takes off. Pretty much anything that requires a plastic part and you can either find on thingiverse.com or design yourself is fair game. It's not all just the figurines and stuff you see a lot of people printing.