The Padded Room

When ZombieHedgehog got his first printer, he went to a 3D printing Discord and asked everything. That server welcomed questions, so he kept asking until he knew enough to take the helper role himself, and he answered other people's questions there for years. "It's okay to ask questions" is the lesson he carried out of it.

Now he's building his own place to answer them: Hedgehog Makes, a community he wants to be understanding and supportive, and a plan to turn hedgehogmakes.com into a searchable 3D printing Q&A library. In his words, he's "just trying to make 3D printing a better experience."

Along the way: how one Ender 3 V2 bought on clearance became roughly thirty printers, why the Orca cube beats a Benchy as a test print, why he thinks 3D printing is further behind on software than on hardware, his Galaxy Red PLA with Polymaker, the Gridfinity bins and dividers he's building in Onshape (in beta, and he's looking for testers), a printed violin his wife can actually play, and how he fits streaming around a kid, a nine-to-five and an 8 p.m. family cutoff. Stay to the end for his episode song, Forty Dollars for a Box.

Timeline: 0:00 Hitting live, the five-minute buffer, and the VOD 3:16 A new rice cookbook, and cooking strictly from recipes 6:10 Two coffee machines, pods, and a camping espresso maker 11:07 Tea at night, and a Tim Hortons stop in northern Maine 14:29 Bucket potatoes, raised beds, and square-foot gardening 15:06 Meet ZombieHedgehog, and what these interviews are for 20:13 Home automation cases, a $40 enclosure, and an Ender 3 V2 on clearance 23:22 Learning in a 3D printing Discord, then signing up as a helper 25:31 First prints: a flexi, a Benchy, and a grass-green spool 28:30 Why 3D printing outlasted woodworking 30:41 Around thirty printers, a donation purge, and the Bambu H2S 33:31 Bambu, Prusa, and the ecosystem question 39:38 Hardware is the easy part; software is where the field is behind 42:40 Favorite prints, and why the newest one usually wins 44:50 The Orca cube over the Benchy 47:05 Printing things worth giving away 49:20 Printed violins, a ukulele, and the piano 50:44 Dead Space, Minecraft with his kid, and ice cream by the layer 1:01:34 The Onshape partnership and a new Gridfinity system in beta 1:04:21 Turning hedgehogmakes.com into a 3D printing Q&A library 1:07:00 Galaxy Red PLA with Polymaker, down to its final spools 1:08:54 How his Monday night show started 1:13:18 Family schedules, and streaming after the house is asleep 1:18:21 His goal: make 3D printing a better experience 1:19:28 Thank-yous and the thumbnail pose 1:20:14 Episode song: Forty Dollars for a Box

Find ZombieHedgehog: Website: https://hedgehogmakes.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@hedgehogmakes Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/zombiehedgehog

The episode song, Forty Dollars for a Box, was written from this conversation and generated with AI (Suno).

Live life to the fullest. Grow in wisdom. Show what you've learned generously.

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Joey left the frame twice while we were talking, both times to go get a part.

The first one he came back with was the catch. Before it existed you screwed his drawer system together. After it, the plastic itself does the work. Assembly went from a couple of minutes of screwing things down to a split second, and it comes back apart just as fast. People kept telling him he should do a compliant mechanism, and his honest answer was that he didn't know what that was.

Then he told me how it actually happened. He had the rough idea of it, and he was in the shower, and he thought about putting it in one exact spot on the design. He mocked it up. First try, it worked. He said that was probably the most excited he's been in a long time, and you could hear it.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Joey has been building Modulith since 2019. It started as one drawer under a table. People asked for wider, then taller, then on top of the table instead of under it, and he kept picking away at it for years until he had something like two hundred files on Printables alone and hundreds more spread across other sites. He called it a mid project crisis. So at the end of last year he started over. He rebuilt the cases and he rebuilt the drawers, 18 drawer sizes and two styles of drawer, and they look almost the same as the old ones. That's his own joke about it. A lot of what he added is for things he hasn't invented yet.

He also built a planner that runs in your browser, and that's the thing I'd go look at first. You start with one drawer and you keep adding until you've laid out a wall. It previews the build in real filament colors, and I mean the actual characteristics, the glitter and the way light goes through it and the little lines the printer leaves on the surface. Then it hands you the parts list for whatever you drew and the links to go download it. He's been in it for a couple of months and he's clearly having a good time, because there are coffee mugs hidden in the render with sayings on them, and there's a cinematic mode he put in for no reason except that he wanted to see it.

Here's what I didn't expect. He can't find his own screws. All those cabinets behind him are prototypes and he keeps robbing them for parts, so the guy who designs storage is, in his words, making his life less organized with his system. He said if he ever actually organized his chaos he'd be able to give people things for gifts.

The core of the system is free and it stays free. He sells decorative parts to pay for the time, and the one that took off is a little edge label he's sold over 500 of, which he still doesn't quite understand. The club that supports the project started at three dollars and he's locked into that price now. Somebody who knows this business better than either of us told him he should raise it. He can't.

The thing that changed how he saw any of it didn't happen online. He set up at a printer festival and lost his voice on the first day because people kept coming up to the table. Until then he had a few comments a week to go on. He told me he had zero idea there was that much interest. I've said it on the show before and I'll say it again here, there's a difference between a keyboard and a handshake.

One more thing, because it's his advice and it's better than mine. Somebody in his community printed a drawer system with over two hundred drawers in it for their Lego collection and it takes up half a room. Joey's reaction was that it scares him and it's amazing at the same time, and he's worried a build like that puts new people off. So he says print one drawer. Print a case, drop a drawer in it, see if you even like it. You don't have to plan the whole wall.

So what have you been putting off because you were planning the whole wall? Come tell me about it.

Find Joey and Modulith: https://modulith.systems

Live life to the fullest. Grow in wisdom. Show what you've learned generously.

Half a tote of failed prints fits in a Manila envelope now.

LayerXLayer didn't set out to prove that. He's the main recycler in his house, the one going through the can asking who put this in here. So from when he first started 3D printing he kept his scraps: failed prints, supports, and later the poop, the purge a printer leaves behind. He kept it hidden in a box, because he didn't want his wife to see it. Then his sister-in-law had an extra t-shirt press. He started flattening the plastic just so it would take up less space, and about half of one of those black and yellow Home Depot totes came down to around 16 plates. The last round he molded around the bottom of a champagne bottle, so they look like little cups.

He'd like a shredder someday. Not for making filament. He just wants to shred his prints and make more plates. People offer him their filament waste, too, and he turns it down. He knows what's in his. He doesn't know what's in yours, and he's the one sitting there breathing it in.

I broke a friend's press doing exactly this on a live, making guitar picks. I'm still a little scared of it.

He calls himself a plastic pusher. He's more designer than printer, and he thinks it's weird that we call people who 3D print "3D printers," because those are the tools we use. His office is about six feet across and fourteen feet deep, so before he prints something he asks whether he needs it and whether it's going to make the room better. He likes wearables best, a crown or a ring, something to give to people.

I wanted to know how a guy who works like that ended up in the middle of the community. He almost didn't. Around 2022 he wanted to go to a 3D printing festival he'd heard about, but there was some drama in the community, someone who was, in his words, kind of racist, and he wasn't sure it was the right place for him. The next year he asked himself where else he was going to go. This is where the 3D printing people are. So he went on a Sunday, walked around, and had a blast. Then he volunteered. Then they asked him to MC, and people he'd watched online for years started following him on X. He met his co-host, and that's how Unspooled started.

He grew up an only child. He doesn't think of himself as an extrovert, and he does a lot of inner monologue. He also hosts music shows, and he shot weddings, where you turn into a bit of a bossy monster to wrangle people without insulting them. He does it with snarky humor. At a booth he messes with people just enough that they don't feel threatened, and they end up saying, all right, you're crazy, I'll come check it out.

Does he get imposter syndrome? "All the time, dude." He was freaking out in his head through his first interview. He feels like his ride has been fast, and that there are people who've been at it longer and haven't been as lucky. Still, if he sees a good opportunity, he says yes, unless it goes against what he believes.

The part I keep coming back to is the computer labs. When he worked for the city, he set up labs in rec centers, most of them in African-American communities, and he'd come back to find nobody had used them. People were afraid of breaking the machines. So he'd tell them, "If you break them, that's what I'm here for. I'm here to fix them." He looks at 3D printing, CNC, laser engravers and UV printing the same way. Somebody from Honduras could make something beautiful we've never seen, because they never had access to the machine. So he shows kids 3D printing at a camp near his house, and a couple of weeks ago he went to a school to help with their machines.

That's the community he's building, on Unspooled and off it. "We're just trying to be a space for everybody," he said. Get the printing talk out of your system, and then let them get to know you. "I personally don't care who you are or what you like, as long as you're not hurting anybody, we're good." He wants Unspooled loose enough that he can just be Steve, and not necessarily LayerXLayer.

His advice for anybody starting out was what he does himself. Be willing to say yes. Have fun, stay out of your own head, and be yourself, because he can tell when you're not.

So who do you know who has never touched a printer because they're afraid of breaking it? What do you think they'd make?

Live life to the fullest. Grow in wisdom. Show what you've learned generously.

Find LayerXLayer: https://layerxlayer.xyz/

His song, "Plastic Pusher" by AL: The Padded Room: [Plastic Pusher streaming link once released]

Watch The Padded Room live Tuesday nights at 7pm ET: https://twitch.tv/asylumlifemakes

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nSiDZli0a9I

Denise printed a Han Solo blaster, and then a bunch of Scouts dropped it.

It was one of the first fancy prints she ever did. In third grade she desperately wanted one. A friend had one, and she never got it. So when she finally had a printer, she printed one, and she said it was just the coolest thing. Later she brought it to a Scouts demo along with some other cool prints, to show what 3D printing can do. It got dropped so many times that they threw it out. That was before she used Gloop. So now she has to make another one.

Denise and I have been running in the same circles for a really long time. We know a lot of the same people. We'd just never sat down and talked, so on The Padded Room we fixed that.

A lot of you know her from her printer reviews at Tom's Hardware. I wanted to know how she got there, and it goes back a long way. She always wanted to be a writer. Her dad was an early adopter, and when he decided he wanted to learn more about photography, he built a darkroom in the basement. So by the time she was about ten she had a black and white darkroom, and she could shoot a roll of film, develop it and get it onto paper. She took little pictures of her action figures. She was the youngest kid on the yearbook staff, and at a small high school she ended up editor of both the newspaper and the yearbook her senior year, back when you pasted things down with wax.

Her dad is an Eagle Scout. When the Girl Scout troop he found for her in another town didn't have enough leaders, he became one, and she says he was the only man who was a Girl Scout leader in their district. People were freaking out. They camped old school, with canvas tents. Then in high school he found her a mounted troop, where the girls rode horses and the dads drove the tractors.

She went to a small state school for journalism and minored in photography. She worked in print shops, and her first job was typesetting business cards. She freelanced as a stringer, one of the people a newspaper sends out to the meetings to cover the boring stuff and turn in three paragraphs that night. Then came a mom blog, and popsicle-stick crafts with her kid. One of those videos, a popsicle-stick catapult, still brings in views, and she figured out who was watching when she saw, "thanks, I got an A on my science fair project."

The first 3D printer she ever saw was at a makerspace for kids run by a children's museum. You'd give them five dollars and they'd print something tiny for you. Her first print was a baby Yoda cookie cutter she set up in Tinkercad. Her mom was a school teacher and their district was very poor, so she figured a printer the schools were using had to be pretty cheap. Then she looked it up and saw $5,000. A while later her husband was at Micro Center shopping for computer parts, her birthday was coming up, and he just picked up a printer and threw it in the cart. That was her first printer, a Creality CR-10S, and it became her grown-up craft. Then Tom's Hardware came along, looking for someone who could write.

What I liked most was why the mom blog never quite fit her. "I'm not narcissistic enough," she said. Everybody else was saying come listen to my story, and she wanted to tell other people's stories. I think it's the same instinct that has her calling herself a tech journalist and not a YouTuber yet. Tom's Hardware pays her the same flat fee whether the printer is a $5,000 Formlabs or an Ender. And on the YouTube side, she said, you can't hire someone to do a review, because then it's not really a review.

The stage didn't come easy either. When Creality asked her to come up and talk at one of their get-togethers, she said no, no, can't do it, and Courtney went up and took her spot. She told me she could do it now. She's made enough goofy videos that she thinks she got over the fear.

Her advice for anyone who wants to start making content was simple. Just start doing it. There's a saying that your first so many videos are all going to stink anyway, so get them over with. The more you do it, the better you get.

So what did you want as a kid that you never got? Have you printed it yet?

Live life to the fullest. Grow in wisdom. Show what you've learned generously.

Find Denise: https://stldenise3d.com

Watch The Padded Room live Tuesday nights at 7pm ET: https://twitch.tv/asylumlifemakes

By the time I got around to Benski, he already had the listing pulled up. I'd asked all three guests about the first thing they ever sold to somebody who wasn't a friend or family, and he went and looked his up. It was a design he'd forgotten he made. He was aggravated that there was no good way to travel with a Dr. Squatch bar, so he designed a holder you can slide the bar out of and back into, and the slide doubles as a soap dish, with holes in the bottom. You take it out, put it in the shower, put it back in the gym bag and go.

A woman in a different state bought it. Then she came back and bought more.

He'd had four or five sales before that, all friends and family, after a Facebook post that said he'd opened his Etsy store. This was the first person who didn't know him at all. And sitting on The Padded Room, almost 2,000 Etsy sales later, reading that listing got to him. He said it out loud: he doesn't think he appreciates his customers as much as he should anymore. When a run of orders comes in now, he gets a little aggravated, because he's thinking about how he's going to fulfill them all.

This episode started because Blair reached out wanting to come on and answer some questions about turning a hobby into a business. Over a series of days it turned into a roundtable with three guests.

Blair, who you might know as Nerdy Chicken, runs Too Many Hobbies. She got there out of burnout. She had launched a pet company during Covid and was working 50 or 60 hour weeks, not getting to see her family. On a vacation she looked at her husband and told him the six 3D printers in his basement were hers now. He asked what they were going to make. Gaming terrain, she said, because she's a wargamer and that was her community.

Then she ran into the wall a lot of you know. Nobody knew who she was. She couldn't compete with Bob on Etsy. So she sold what sells to get to what she loves, starting with an axolotl. That was her first sale to a stranger, and it was the one she'd painted a little face on, after her husband told her the eyes weren't worth the time.

Bearded Printer, Eric, is coming at it from a different place. He still has a full-time job. He started designing because he'd see something and wonder if he could make his own, and people started downloading. One of his first models that took off was a flexi water dragon he didn't even like very much. He told us that knowing he won't have a safety net is what would change how he designs, and that he has to hate his full-time job enough to quit before that switch flips. He's also stopped selling prints of his own models, because he could easily sell them cheaper and still make a bigger profit, and that didn't feel fair to him.

We spent a long stretch on burnout, and all three of them were honest about it. Benski said a lot of his comes from being the main breadwinner, and the thing that helps is accepting it instead of fighting it, giving yourself the grace to know you're not a robot, and sometimes printing something just for yourself. Blair said she's in what she calls the messy middle right now. She walked up to another vendor at a show and told her she'd hit the point where she hated her business, and the woman said she'd been there. Volunteering with First Robotics is what brought Blair back to her mission. Bearded works in sprints: sprint, rest, sprint, rest.

Then we argued about the race to the bottom. Bearded says if you're selling something unique, there's nothing to race. Benski says it mostly exists for people who are only in it to make money. Blair says the phrase is mostly used to insult people. A cheeseburger is a cheeseburger, and her price is her price.

Her last advice was to name your support network, and then decide what you actually want out of the business, whether that's an extra $500 a month or a retirement plan.

So here's my question for you. Who was your first stranger, and do you still remember what they bought?

Benski: @basically_benski on YouTube · Bearded Printer: https://www.beardedprinter.com · Nerdy Chicken / Too Many Hobbies: https://toomanyhobbies.com

Watch The Padded Room live Tuesday Nights at 7pm ET: https://twitch.tv/asylumlifemakes

Live life to the fullest. Grow in wisdom. Show what you've learned generously.

His mom's way of grounding him was to take away whatever he was enjoying most: the game console, then the TV, then the radio, until all he had left was books. So he read the encyclopedia that summer.

In this Padded Room conversation, Modern Magician (David Bates) goes back to the beginning. A first PC built from parts headed for the trash, a GED that opened the door to tech jobs, and a habit of moving to wherever the next thing to learn was, including writing test software for the Mac side during the Antennagate era, by his account. He talks about the Special Olympics medals he learned to electroplate, a Valentine's Day gift printed from a favorite photo of the two of them, the two browser tools he built, MeshRx and Mat2Vert, and the inventory problem he wants someone to solve. He also gives his advice on using AI as a tool with your own hand in the output.

Somebody in chat asked if we could see a picture of a young RetroMaker, and he said sure, he had one right there on his desk.

Christmas, 1983. Glasses. He's doing a little overbite on purpose, to be cool. And there in the shot is his first boombox.

The boombox he designed to be 3D printed, the one that more or less started his whole retro catalog, is kind of based on that one. He didn't lead with that. It came out twenty-some minutes in, because somebody in the room asked for a picture.

That happened all night. I'd ask about a model and the answer would turn into something he did as a kid, or a movie he loves.

When I asked him for the elevator pitch he said 3D designer and handyman, and then told me he doesn't really have one, because he works for himself and doesn't pitch anybody. A few minutes later he gave me the real one without trying. "I'm into the past." Old movies, old TV shows, old pop culture. He has a set of coasters based on the pattern on the kitchen wall in Breakfast at Tiffany's. He designed a trunk made of a pile of printed parts and covered it in travel-sticker labels, all Colorado ones, including the Overlook Hotel and the Gold Room from The Shining. Ask him his favorite movie and he'll want to say Blade Runner, but he always goes back to The Shining. He figures he's seen it twelve or fifteen times.

Then he told me something I didn't expect. In high school, around Rochester, the George Eastman House used to show old movies, and he went. He was a teenager and everybody else there was about sixty and older. He never told his friends.

"I was into all sorts of stuff that my friends didn't know. Cause I was embarrassed."

Now on Fridays he runs trivia on his Twitch and then shows an old movie. Right now it's the Star Wars-ish independent stuff from the late seventies. So the same old movies he used to keep to himself, he now puts on screen for whoever shows up. He says a lot of them he hasn't seen either, so he gets to watch them too.

That thread runs through more of him than the movies. He told me he's always kind of been shy. He's been DJing since 1999, mostly as what he calls a basement or bedroom DJ, and at one point he took a job DJing weddings for a company that handed him the gear. Nobody pushed him into it. He wanted to get on a microphone in front of a bunch of people and make himself do it, and he says it made a big difference. He has a separate DJ channel too, once a month or so earlier this year. Two to five people watch, and he says he does it more for himself, and for the graphics. He loves building intricate OBS overlays.

The retro work itself started with a favor. A streamer friend who does puppetry wanted his puppet to break-dance, and he needed a boombox with a Bluetooth speaker in it. So RetroMaker figured out a boombox with a lid you could drop a small speaker into. Then a 1967 TV you slide your phone into. Then radios, including a 1930s radio he actually owns, rebuilt for printing with a speaker inside.

Before any of that, there was a cardboard fort. As a kid he built a whole fort out of corrugated cardboard, something from the 1700s or 1800s,, held together with toothpicks and glue. Drafting class in high school. A grandfather who was an architectural engineer in New York City and took him onto big building sites. An architecture degree from Virginia Tech, from a program so arts-heavy he learned watercolor, darkroom photography and printmaking along the way. He couldn't find an architecture job when he graduated, so he did graphic and web design for about ten years.

He told me he still kind of regrets not following through on it. What he's thinking about now is getting his building models and dioramas good enough that it becomes a way back in, maybe making models for an architecture firm. Watching him talk about the chapel, I believe it. The stonework is made of panels that each have to match the next one so the pattern runs continuous. He's been working on it for a couple of years, putting it down whenever his skill hit a wall and coming back to it. When it finally printed the way he wanted, he said it was so cool to see it actually printing.

His advice to designers at the end was plain. Design what you love, something that excites you and pushes your skill. Start small if you're new. And he usually finds the best designers aren't doing what everybody else is doing.

So here's what I want to ask you. What are you into that you've never told anybody about? And is there a way to make it?

Live life to the fullest. Grow in wisdom. Show what you've learned generously.

I asked her to give me a pose for the YouTube thumbnail and she asked if she could put her dino in it.

That is the moment I keep coming back to from this one. Not because it is cute, though it is. Because another maker made that dino. He is starting out in model making and he has been making little critters based on the likeness of his friends, and she was one of the ones he picked. She held it up to the camera like it was a credential.

We had been talking for nearly an hour by then and I had already got the thing I actually wanted, which came out about forty seconds into the interview. I asked for the elevator pitch. What do you tell somebody who asks what you do.

"I'm a maker. I like to call myself a print maker."

Not a 3D printer. A print maker. And she means it the old way. High school art, and the printmaking classes in particular — intaglio, etchings, lithography, all of it by hand. What got her was that you make a piece and then you can make it again.

That is the whole interview, and she handed it to me at the top.

Because look at the order things happened in. Printmaking by hand. Then a commercial graphics career. Then Disney, where she was not a college-program hire — they brought her on outright, onto the team that built PhotoPass from the ground up, in quality and development, with a desk in the Feature Animation building. She will tell you she was adjacent to Imagineering, not in it, and she is careful about that distinction in a way that tells you something.

The printer arrives last. And it arrives because her nephew bought a dragon at an event and it broke almost immediately, and he came to her and asked what she could do about it.

She bought three printers.

Not one to see how it went. Three. She had an Ender before that and it went badly, so she put it on a shelf and decided she would wait until the technology evolved, because she is not a tinkerer and she knew it. Then the Bambu A1 came out, she was one of the first people to have one, and she went in. Ten of those, then the minis, then most of the range.

I have met a lot of people who got into printing because they wanted a printer. She got into it because a kid asked her for something.

That pattern runs all the way through. Breakwater Print Co. is the business now — apparel, banners, stickers, DTF — and when I asked what she is going for she landed on boutique, which is the right word for it. She will not print the graphic somebody hands her if the graphic is bad. She would rather fix it and tell you.

Then there is the part I was not expecting to spend twenty minutes on.

"I will always give more than I receive. That's just who I am across the board."

She ran a project through Snapmaker this summer and printed a gift for every single rider at this year's Dream Ride. All six hundred of them. Packaged them too. Six hundred riders from seventeen countries, three days in Farmington, six hundred cars going out on a seventeen-mile run and coming back to a police escort, medals she describes as Olympic style, a red carpet.

"I'm not a millionaire, I can't give back money, but I can give back my time and my talent."

There is a whole other layer underneath that one which is hers to tell and not mine, and she did tell it on the night. What I will say is that the six hundred gifts are not a marketing project. They are a thank-you, and she knows exactly who she is thanking.

She is also starting something called Motion Makers with other creators, aimed at getting fidgets into special-education classrooms, because the teachers do not have the funds for them. That is brand new and she is still rolling it out.

Somewhere in the last ten minutes she showed me burnt titanium PETG, admitted she is outsourcing part of an R2 build, and told me her printers get witchy vibes and start misbehaving after two days.

So here is what I actually want to ask you. She told me the word she uses for herself in the first minute, and it reframed everything that came after it. What is yours? Not your job title. The word you would pick.

Live life to the fullest. Grow in wisdom. Show what you've learned generously.

Stephi: @stephimakes3d — https://linktr.ee/stephimakes3d

The first thing Bearded Printer ever 3D printed was half of a Baymax.

It was the sample file that came with his first printer, an Anet A8 kit. He bought it because an Ender 3 was more than his budget could handle. He built the kit, felt pretty competent about it, and sent a print. He hadn't leveled the bed. He didn't know you were supposed to. The nozzle started digging into the plate, and he let it go for about thirty seconds, wondering if that was just what 3D printers do, before he decided it probably wasn't and shut it off.

Then he noticed some screws on the bed, turned them until it stopped grinding, sent the print again and went to bed. His roommate was up late, saw the print had failed and turned the printer off for him. So he woke up to half a Baymax.

His first clog went about the same way. A safety pin was too big for the nozzle, so he took the nozzle outside and hit it with a propane torch. And it worked! The plastic oozed out and the clog cleared.

He's got the same kind of story about his career. In high school he wanted to be an architect and took CAD classes. Then in college he took an engineering course that had some MATLAB programming in it, and he was terrible at it. He didn't understand it at all and passed with a C-minus. So, naturally, he changed his degree to software engineering. That's what he does for a living now.

He says he never really stuck with a hobby growing up. He skateboarded, he played outside with his friends, and the hobby changed all the time. In high school his dream job was data entry, because he liked typing. What he did grow up with was a dad who fixed everything around the house, from plumbing and electrical to the cars and the yard. If they were going to put in a sprinkler system, the family did it themselves. "We figure it out, we do it ourselves." I think you can hear that in the Anet A8 story. It just took him a while to add the research.

The A8 finally ended when it ran out of filament mid-print. He was so done with it that the failed print was still sitting on the bed while he ordered the next printer. He'd seen Linus Media Group's Short Circuit on the Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro, heard the words "runout sensor" and was sold. That was 2023. This time he did look around before he pre-ordered it, and he watched the videos on leveling the bed and setting the Z offset first. The little Buddha that came with the Elegoo finished in about half an hour. He took it downstairs to show his wife, and she said, "Already?" On the A8 that Buddha would have taken something like four hours.

Once the prints looked good, he had the thought everybody has: I can sell these. But he didn't want to pay licensing to sell other people's models. So he moved from Tinkercad to Fusion and started designing his own. He says it was getting the Neptune 4 Pro that made design click for him, and he calls it probably the biggest hobby he's ever gone all in on.

Now his models have about a quarter of a million downloads. When I brought that number up, he said his parents have always backed him, but there's something about a bunch of strangers telling you what you're doing is good that makes you feel like you're actually making a difference. He still remembers the first time a model broke a hundred downloads. It was a finger puppet, a little top hat for your finger with a face he drew. He was thrilled.

I asked him how he thinks about a number that size. Most of it, he said, is one water dragon, the first design he'd call viral. He doesn't see himself as an amazing creator or designer. He thinks of himself as "just a guy with a hobby."

Then he told me what he's doing with all that. Most of the people following him came for the floppy models. He loves the floppies and he'll keep releasing them. But he wants to design things that are more helpful to people, so he's been making bowls and lamps and lights, and he isn't expecting those to pull the same downloads, because that's not what his followers came for. He described it as having to build up followers all over again in a different genre. He's doing it anyway.

When I asked what he'd tell somebody who wants to start designing or making content, he said this: "Don't be afraid to be bad at something. There's no way you can be good at something without first being bad at it." When he first started designing, he entered Printables contests knowing full well he wouldn't win, just to get himself designing things. He released models he knew were bad. And yes, he learned his lesson and started watching tutorials. He still likes trying to figure things out on his own, and falls back on a tutorial when he can't.

So what's the thing you've been waiting to get good at before you let yourself start it?

Find Bearded Printer: beardedprinter.com · @BeardedPrinter on YouTube and Twitch

Live life to the fullest. Grow in wisdom. Show what you've learned generously.

Somebody in the peanut gallery asked TechJeeper what the Polaroid on the wall behind him was. It's not a Polaroid. It's a rug, and he tufted it himself.

It's also the only one he's ever made. He liked doing it. He still has all the pieces, he says he wants to do it again, and he and his wife went and backed a robotic tufting machine on Kickstarter that shows up in October. But the rug is one rug, and he was straightforward about why. "I have a million hobbies, and oftentimes I'll go head first into a hobby and I'll do it and I'll never do it again."

Once he said that, I started hearing it everywhere else in the conversation.

He built websites for his friends in high school, back in the MySpace era when you could drop your own CSS into a page and make something nobody else had. He liked it enough to start a web design company while he was in college. Then it was work. He finished his last customer project and didn't really do web design again until he started Printventory about three years ago. He did craft shows and sold prints for a while too, until he noticed he was printing for the show instead of printing because he wanted to.

And one Christmas his wife got him a Tevo Tarantula kit. He spent weeks on it, and when he finally got it together it never printed well. So he quit. Two years, nothing, and he'd already been printing for more than a decade at that point. What brought him back was a hundred-dollar Ender 3 from Micro Center. Cheap enough that trying again cost him nothing.

He does this with jobs too, and he'll tell you so without softening it. If he woke up dreading the login, he'd go find another one. He has, more than once, usually because he stopped feeling like the work meant anything.

Which brings us to the thing people actually ask him about. Printventory is free. It's a real piece of software — people turn up in his Discord asking whether it'll handle their 49 terabytes of models — and he gets messages on Reddit almost daily about somebody selling a clone of it for forty dollars a year. So why doesn't he charge?

"If I charge for it, I'm going to have an obligation to keep it around."

He does love helping people and he means it, but that's not the load-bearing part. The free part is an exit. It's open source and it's sitting on GitHub, so the day he gets bored he can walk and somebody else can pick it up. Start taking money and he'd owe people a fix, and he already has a job where he owes people things.

So he can leave anything. That's established.

Now look at what he doesn't leave.

He stayed up three days straight building MakerChip with Kevin, who is particular about every little thing, and he calls those three days fun. Last week he wrote a firmware mod for Kevin's Panda Touch so Kevin could see every printer he owns on one screen, and had to scrape together enough memory on the thing to get it to authenticate at all. Karen wanted a TV guide view on MakersOnStream, so MakersOnStream has a TV guide view. She's also the reason he finally started a Discord after holding out for years. He taught her the AI programming side of things, built her one version of a chat pond, and then told her to build the next one herself and offered to sit on a call and show her how.

His wife does fiber arts, and he was working on an app for her that would take a pattern and show you what the finished piece is going to look like. Nobody has figured that out mathematically yet, so there was nothing for the AI to have learned from and no shortcut to take. They were poking at it anyway. He also makes her something for every holiday and every event. "She always loves it. I like seeing people enjoy what I'm giving them."

And the print that meant the most to him wasn't for him either. He'd been collecting knives for a while, so this past Father's Day he bought a decent one specifically because he knew he could print new scales for the handle. His father-in-law was airborne. He put the unit insignia on it.

The man still carries it. Pulls it out, shows people, tells them his son-in-law made it.

He'll walk away from a hobby or a tool or a job the day it stops being fun. He stayed up three days for Kevin.

So what have you kept doing, and is there somebody on the other end of it?