I'm a Unix/Linux old geezer so, as I had access to Blender, I used it as my design tool. I'm not sure that I should not have chosen OpenSCAD as I've had experience with POVRAY and from examples I've looked at, there seems a strong relationship between them. And I like the idea of ASCII text files I can twiddle. Blender is definitely more a tool for artists and to do engineering type design utilizing it requires a lot of re-thinking as well as learning how to constrain things to specific geometries.

After a bit of research it was obvious (to me) that sintering had it hands down over filament printing and that I could have a lot of sintered items printed for the cost of even the lowest priced filament machine. The primary reason sintering is so much better is that you can virtually ignore "e;overhang"e;; I can hardly imagine a useful item I would design that didn't have some overhang and designing supports etc and the cleanup after printing is something I wanted to avoid. I happened to choose Shapeways as the company to do my printing and have nothing but good to say about them.

I started by trying to make simple objects in Blender. It was interesting to say the least. Almost everything I tried to do using my background in engineering drawing was a failure. Using tutorials I sought on the web plus lots of practice and learning from my failures I slowly began to make progress.

An early design piece was a simple right angled part with a slot.

Blender Mesh view	Blender Solid view	Finished Object

Another of the early items was a simple bracket; something I could have drawn in five minutes with a triangle, T-square and compass. I don't want to tell how many hours I spent until I managed using Blender!

Blender Rendering	Blender Solid view

Then I wanted to make a part that fitted the slotted hole in the bracket. Something like this.

Blender Rendering	Blender Solid view

Here's where sintered parts really shine.
Look at the fit between these two parts. (I've chamfered the end with flats in preparation for threading so it looks a bit rough.)

A great fit

Then I tackled something far more ambitious; something hollow and with lots of holes:

Blender Mesh view	Blender Solid view	Blender Cutaway view	The finished object

Then there's finishing off some of the arbor. Here it is with the bearings pressed into the ends and I've included in the picture one of the end caps which were printed seperately. It will be tricky to drill and fit small screws to hold the caps on.

Bearings Fitted And, Believe	it or not, the shaft

Over the summer I updated to another Linux system (old one was crufty) and I could run OpenSCAD. A winner here, in a short time I was able to re-do the arbor. Outer shell here shown ghosted.

Taking some time off for fishing. More to come this fall.

Some time later and I decided to expand my abilities by combining inkscape, openscad and blender. So I put on my beret and tried some "arty" stuff. First I did a mayfly stripping guide:

The design	Grrr, ring too big	A hatch!

Then onto more buggy stuff an ant and a damselfly:

The damselfly design	An ant	Meet your new neighbor

And then there's always some more practical stuff where dimensions matter:

A slightly (by design) helical gear.	Good design	goes together, like peanut butter and jelly.

And pimp my vise:

Material clip (sans spring)		Keep track of the allen key