One of the first things I printed out with my 3D printer was an earring. Back then my printer had some wrong settings and the printing dimensions came out wrong. That didn’t stop me from wearing the ring that night though, I was proud of my first print which looked like something. This is how my peace earring looks like:
Later on I found this awesome collection by Schorhr entitled Daily Earrings, which has very detailed earrings with interesting geeky themes. Schorhr printed his designs on a commercial desktop 3D printer, UP!, which I have mixed feelings about since it is “closed source”, but still a great incentive for the 3D printing movement which will change the ways things are fabricated. One thing is undeniable though, UP!’s printing resolution is better than Makerbot’s (my DIY printer), and its software allows for easily printing overhangs. So it turned out that I couldn’t print out all the designs I wanted, and some of them came out in an inferior quality, but they came out much better than I could expect, so I love my Makerbot for that.
The eggs came out perfectly. The squid, the turtle, the gekko and the camera came out better than I expected, but not as well as Schorhr’s, and some came out without a ring to be hanged. Some of the tetris came out good, with the ring and all, but others didn’t – it seems to depend a lot on the piece’s position and the path the nozzle was doing before getting to the ring. Still, I was able to make a nice tetris bracelet. The traffic light came out bad and some of its parts broke, but it looks much better after painting. And the fish came out terrible hehehe I also tried printing his foosball table, the castle, the pinball, pac man, film stripe, earth core and spiked mace, all unsuccessfully. Maybe some of them could be printed in a bigger size or using support, but I haven’t tried that.
Since I was in a ring mood, I quickly added a ring to emili‘s UFO on OpenSCAD too.
I’ve been printing out a lot of personalized keychains for my friends. I used tbuser’s bitmap font module, and my derivative Japanese katakana bitmap font to make keychains with letters (I had previously made some Japanese keychains to test my font as well). Oh and in case you’re wondering, all the paint jobs were done with nail polish, and the poor painting is due to my limited skills…
And finally, I’ve made a few personalized keychains with Brazilian football club symbols. I designed a “cruz de malta”, symbol of the Vasco da Gama club with my friend’s name on it, and the crest of the Fluminense club with my friend’s initials instead of the original ones. When printing details such as letters on flat surfaces, I’ve noticed it comes out better if the letters are on the side of the print instead of on top, so they are part of the object’s outline. This results in better resolution and less ooze (strings), because when on top the nozzle, at least for me, moves too fast and the details get messy. So I’ve printed both vertically (the MR had a small support which I cut off). The Victor one was the first time I changed plastic mid-print to make an object in many colors.
The single letters were easily made with the previously mentioned modules plus a quick ring on OpenSCAD (the same way as I did for the UFO). I modelled the cruz de malta on OpenSCAD by combining some cubes and cylinders, and added the name with the bitmap module.
With the Fluminense ring I tried extruding 2D shapes for the first time. I traced the club’s crest on Inkscape (open source graphics editor) and added the letters through the process described by Kepler. I have some other projects involving 2D extrusion coming up soon!
I haven’t uploaded my designs and derivatives to thingiverse because I find them too simple or too personalized to be useful for anyone. If you want some of them gimme a shout. I might be uploading football club’s symbols at some point, but this is not on the top of my list since I’m not really into them (too divisive…).
I’m sure I’ll be printing many more rings for a long time hehehe
my Shumi 
Cool, I haven’t seen that one yet!