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Blocking Tool (for knitting)

Apparently, when you knit something, you should “block” it. Meaning: making it wet and stretch/attach it to something to get (or keep?) the right shape. When I have to wash a knitted item I tend to panic. I’m really not into knitting. Someone else was however, and she wanted “something with measurements” to make the blocking easier for the many little pieces she was working on. Might have been blankets for a whole family of mice, I don’t know.

So I made a 20*20 cm thing in Fusion 360, with logo and 1 cm intervals. You can download it here.

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Settlers of Catan

When having a 3D-printer for the first time, one is obligated to print a lot of useless stuff before making something, ah, less useless. So I printed a whole set of 3D-Catan tiles. I painted e few of them (in the foreground). When they are all painted (by 2030?) it will be cool!

I also bought 500 magnetic balls (Ø3 mm). I will design a matching base, drop in the balls and glue them to the tiles. The tiles will then stick together, or so says the internet.

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Drawing Class

In the middle of the pandemic, school year 2020-2021, I took a drawing class. It was fun. We were even able to draw a few times without masks. Apparently in “normal” times, such a class is even móre fun, with cookies and a happy artist-y vibe. Now even the model had to wear a mask (but nothing else).

I’m really not very good at getting the ratios right. Luckily it were mostly very short poses, matching my attention span. The first one is my favourite, with Inez holding a little Inez statue from another class :-).

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Camper Lock

My parents have a nice and – quite – luxurious Camper. They bought it when it was a few years old but barely used. As usual my Dad started to make improvements immediately, all while complaining about “bad design and worse implementation”.

Quite soon he found out that the locking mechanism wasn’t an exception. When closing a lock there’s some stress on the lock housing, and it cracks after a while. Probably worsened because of a higher brittleness caused by UV or plastic ageing. New locks could be ordered, but for a hefty price tag.

Enter me and my brand new Ender 3 Pro 3D-printer. I made a copy with Fusion360 and many, many iterations later we have a functioning replacement. I tried to use PETG, but layer bonding wasn’t as strong as PLA.

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Dinosaur Condo

Apparently eggs don’t grow on trees, but drop out of cloacae. A fancy name for a multi-functional butt hole. I made mine a fully enclosed dinosaur cage, which was quite handy during the bird flu. It also prevents them from getting eaten. One of the 2 dinosaurs dropped dead anyway and got eaten in very small increments.

A tried to make a dinosaur house using advised dimensions. As usual, scope creep gave the house an actual living roof. I’m surprised that almost 2 years later, the plants are still alive.

The white one, dubbed “Stegosaurus” dropped dead later. I used leftover cedar wood from the house as sidings.

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Birth Announcement Cards

My 2 little human beings are probably the biggest accomplishments on this website. There’s also a LOT of maintenance required. Teaches me to do a better job of planning a project, especially the TCO.

For both of them, I made the birth announcement cards myself. The first one was actually my first foray into digital art, drawn as vectors with the mouse.

Left the front, right the back – yes we had 3 cats at the time

Some 3 years later, the next birth announcement card was a “good” excuse to buy a professional Wacom tablet & CLIP Studio Paint. I elaborated further on the front & back concept. The inside was an actual book. I wanted a ISBN number, but that was deemed “too much” by the mother.

There’s one big big big spelling mistake in the text – proof that everybody can make mistakes :-).

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Painting my cargobike

In spring 2021 I had to electrify my cargobike. The combined weight of 2 kids just became too much. It’s a “bakfiets.nl”, first generation, so the Bafang engine didn’t easily fit. Nothing a bit of cutting and welding couldn’t fix :-).

I also upgraded the back brake and strengthened the cargo part.It used to be painted with Shaun the sheep, but Shaun had shed a lot of his wool so the kids were allowed to choose something new.

The fat unicorn is based on a internet GIF, that I can’t find the correct source for. The shark is my own design.

After 9 months and ~3.500 km, the biggest challenge is that I have to recharge often (really not that superb quality battery-management wise). Bolts and stuff tend to come loose faster. On the other hand I only had to invest ca. € 800 to have a functional and very unique electrified cargobike.