3D printed marble game

This is Hextraction, a 3D printable game (https://www.playhextraction.com/). The creator has released all his designs under an open licence (MIT), so anyone is basically free to print it, and even sell and profit off of it. Which is cool. I wanted to try. I had never 3D printed anything, this seemed like a decently easy project.

Problem: I don't have a 3D printer. What do?

Turns out the city library has five 3D printers that are entirely free to use, along with a selection of plastics (PLA) in different colors. Which is just awesome! So I have spent a few hours there (and there will be more this coming summer).

This picture is from yesterday, when an elementary school class had reserved all of them for printing soap bubble rods of different cool shapes. So no printing for me here.

One of the printers in action. It takes about an hour for each tile. Yeah, it's gonna be a while. And no, I can't use all those printers. Library rules say only one at a time per person. Even if four of them stand vacant. And they apparently keep an eye on it; I tried and got busted. It seems a few jerks ruined it for the rest of us by being totally inconsiderate about it, and now I must suffer.

This picture is from a different branch yesterday, where I at least got one print done despite the main branch being occupied. They only have the one, and fifteen minutes into this print a couple of kids came up and wanted to print something small for fun (I dunno, a bookmark or something). I felt kinda bad about that. So methinks I won't be hogging this one much more. Kids wanting to have fun in a library trumps my needs.

Some of the results. I'm nowhere near done yet, and I don't even know whether they work, as the steel balls have yet to arrive. But I'm looking forward to playing this sometime in the not too distant future.

Moral of the story: Libraries rule! They let me do something like this and it's all freaking free!