(upbeat music)
- So I've got a 3D printer.
I mean, I know you know that, you've seen the title
in the thumbnail of this video,
but it was something I'd thought about
for a really long time, but had held off from,
because I'm not sure I need more hobbies in my life.
But I was browsing Thingiverse one day,
which is a kind of online resource of free models
to download and print yourself.
And I just was searching for coffee stuff
and there was a lot, and I wanted to know what it was like.
And I thought I would find out and share that experience
with you for a video, 'cause it's kind of interesting,
you know, can you print your own coffee accessories?
Should you print your own coffee accessories
or get a friend to do it?
So I printed five different things for this video
and I'll go through each one of them and talk about
why I picked it, why I think it's interesting
and what the kind of implications of all of this stuff is
as 3D printing becomes kind of a thing that is everywhere.
Now, I bought a Prusa if you care about these things.
I bought a kit, I don't know if I would buy it again.
It wasn't difficult to build, but it wasn't easy to build.
I guess it was satisfying to build, you know,
I understand what all the pieces do and how it all works,
and that's kind of a good thing I think long-term,
if I wanna upgrade pieces of the printer
or that kind of stuff.
But wow, did I underestimate how long it would take me,
but it got to working and I started printing and I love it.
I love it, it's just, it's incredibly satisfying
and it's everything I feared it would be,
but let's talk about some prints
because I think there's some cool stuff here.
Now, frustratingly Thingiverse has a kind of tip function
where you can tip the creators and I wanted to do that,
but most of them don't appear to have that function
set up on there.
I will be trying to track them down to compensate them
in some way for having contributed to this video,
'cause I think that's really only fair,
but they've designed and shared some cool stuff.
And it's free, you can just go there, take the model
and print it, and if you own a printer, the cost
of printing is negligible.
Oh yeah, one more important thing, I am like the person
who just bought their first espresso machine
and it is finally getting like good espresso at home.
I am very excited, I am excited about this hobby,
I know nothing really beyond how to do what I'm doing
right now and I have nothing really to teach anyone yet.
So don't take any, I'm not gonna teach you
anything meaningful about 3D printing today.
'Cause I don't know anything meaningful about 3D printing.
Let's talk about the prints, 'cause the first one
just kind of blew my mind with the fact that it exists
or that it didn't exist outside of Thingiverse.
It's this, made by a user called Jayuk.
I think this is brilliant, do you know what this is for?
Let me show you what this is for.
This is a moka pot sort of basket stand
'cause those are stupid things to dose.
Let me just get one.
Now the problem with this part of the design
and being weird about coffee is that weighing,
so your dose into this is not easy.
You're trying to balance this on a set of scales, come on.
When you balance, there you go.
Precarious, awful, as an experience
but someone just made this, a little stand.
It's just a little stand that you can just put your thing in
dose your coffee and it won't fall down.
I just think that's cool.
I just think somebody saw a problem and created a fix
that no one else was gonna fix, right?
Because only certain numbers of moka pot users care
about this, or I would worry about this.
But I just love that it's fixed and for pennies.
I have a solution to a problem that I genuinely have had
and someone made this and shared it for free.
One of the things I do worry about as I make this video is
that someone will watch this video and be like,
"Oh, I make things, my business makes things, that's cool.
I should make that, I should take this design
that's available for free and commercialize it
or just tweak it slightly and do that."
Don't do that, it's not cool, that's not okay.
We'll find you and call you and be mean about you
on the internet.
If that counts for anything.
I just think this is a great little innovation,
a great little solution to a problem.
And it's kinda available to people who care enough
to wanna fix the problem.
Anyway, Jayuk the guy that kind of made this or shared this
or uploaded this to Thingiverse, thank you very much.
I appreciate this, this is definitely gonna go into rotation
and use in this kind of thing.
And I should probably do an updated video
on the moka pot soon.
Now that was genuinely the first thing that I printed
and the second thing that I printed is a little bit dull,
but also just kind of cool.
It's this and I'm consistently impressed
by how nice it feels.
I mean, I've had 3D printed stuff in the past,
I've had 3D printed parts on equipment
or kind of 3D printed accessories bundled in with stuff,
and I'd never really thought about
what could I make at home.
Now, as you've noticed, the set has slightly changed,
we're moving spaces and kind of rebuilding
the kind of kitchen set.
And these, I'm gonna print a couple of these,
are gonna go in there.
It's a wall-mounted portafilter holder.
Three screws mounts on the wall, take your portafilter
and just click it in.
And it fits beautifully, really well.
This is obviously designed for the kind of 58 mil
side-on lug, so something like Simonelli portafilter
or Victoria Arduino portafilter wouldn't fit in this
the right way, but for the kind of standard side on logs,
58 mils, really nice fit, credits to Jim Higson,
the user who uploaded this in 2017 for making
and sharing this.
I think it is delightful, but speaking of espresso
and portafilters, the next thing I printed was
a little bit bigger again, was this,
it's a thing, it's a bit confusing.
It's designed specifically for the Niche grinder,
which I just so happen to have here.
Now with the Niche, typically you would have a dosing cup
like this, this is the new one, it's very nice.
And it sits there and you grind that and give it a shake
and put in your portafilter, but maybe you don't
wanna do that, maybe you want a different workflow.
Maybe you wanna grind straight into the portafilter.
Now I don't know how many Niches are out there in the world,
but it's a good amount.
But as a percentage, the people who wanna grind
straight into a portafilter, not high.
So no one's gonna build a solution for you
and commercialize it, I suspect, but you can 3D print one.
If you take this off and this off you'll see
this little bolt here, let's just take this bolt out.
And then this goes on there and now you're grinding,
oh, you're just grinding straight in, straight in.
Now again, the thing that's kind of interesting
to me is you might wanna change this slightly,
you might want this slightly higher up,
slightly lower down, it depends.
You can do that if you want to.
Now this looks like it could get a bit messy,
it might've benefited from having like a dosing ring
around it.
But of course I made one, I printed a dosing ring
because you can, it sits inside the portafilter
because you can, because it's easy, how delightful.
What I liked about the model for this one actually came
with choices of how you wanted to do your dosing rings.
You can have one like this that sits inside the portafilter,
the same user, the same files.
There's variations of how you wanna do it,
and it's all just, it's just there.
So now, you can do it so neatly
and it fits beautifully, perfectly.
Now, it is important to acknowledge once something
like ground coffee is touching this stuff.
This is PLA and PLA is not food safe.
So if I was to make this for kinda regular usage,
I might switch to something like PETG,
but just for this video for demonstration
and for me learning what I'm doing, PLA super easy
to work with, had lots and yeah, I made a dosing funnel
that works really nicely.
Now the last thing I wanna show you, I need a portafilter
with the dosing funnel and to show you,
and I think it's really cool, probably the coolest one
of all of them if I'm honest, though it is a bit more work
and it isn't just PLA, there's more stuff.
But I think it's just cool.
Now, if you're thinking I want one of these,
but I don't have a printer.
Well, hang around for a second because this video
has a sponsor, has an ad in it.
It means I'm gonna print a few of these different things
and just give them a way to you
if you have no way of accessing a 3D printer,
if you've got no friend with a 3D printer,
if that's just impossible to you, we'll do a little giveaway
and that's possible because this video has an ad
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and they have a whole bunch of different ones,
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but you're not staring at the equivalent
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So this terrifying looking thing is a nine pronged WDT tool,
white or vice I've seen whites, I don't know,
distribution tool.
And it's designed to break apart the clumps
in your bed of coffee.
And this one is great, it's really good.
And just to show you what I mean, you would use it
to sort of whisk around the grounds here,
make them all fluffy, breakup any clumps.
Lovely, beautiful results, better extraction, more evenness.
I haven't done a video on puck prep and I'm going to,
I'm gonna discuss a load of different distribution tools
like these kinds of things, but broadly speaking
in many, many, many scenarios, I think they're really good.
I think they're useful, I think they help you
make better coffee, I think they're worth the time
and effort, and I just love that there's a 3D printed one
that is this good.
Now this is uploaded by a user called JK makes
and it's kind of two pieces.
There is a separate sort of holder for it that you can print
that you can kind of leave it in.
But the two pieces are very simple,
they're just thread together.
You got a sort of top part of the handle
and then inside you have these.
Now, ironically, you buy these to clean the nozzles
on 3D printers, it's just a little pin for doing that
and works well, but you can use them
to make a distribution tool.
I bought these from Amazon, I'll leave a link down below
if you wanna sort of get some of these needles
for that sort of stuff.
I'm not sure I'd recommend like just buying one
and doing this, I think having nine of them
in one sort of thing is very cool.
They're obviously kind of commercially available versions
of these tools now, pretty widely available on a bunch
of different websites from different manufacturers.
This is a touch cheaper, probably 20 pounds worth
of filament here and seven pounds worth of needles,
which you could probably get cheaper if you hunted them out
a little bit more.
I didn't do a lot of hunting, I just went with the ones
that could get quickly and easily.
But yeah, that's probably seven pounds 50,
by the time I factored in electricity and all the rest
of it or whatever else.
So it's cheap, but I will say as a tool this 3D printed
open-source tool is as good as anything anyone is making
anywhere, and I think that's great.
I do clear there's a big community around 3D printing,
there's a big community around coffee.
I think obviously crossovers is super interesting there too,
but yeah, genuinely impressed, like it fits together
really nicely, it looks really good.
It works really well and I made it, I mean, I didn't,
I just pushed go on a printer, but I feel like I made it
and that counts for something these days.
It was satisfying to create this thing.
Now I'm not gonna say it's all easy and perfect
all of the time, I've had failed prints, you know,
along the way.
My first attempt at this kind of went wrong
and the print failed about halfway through,
which was maddening.
I've had prints not stick to the beds quite early on,
but to me it has been an unexplored aspect
of the kinda wider online communities.
And I've just wanted to print some stuff, try some stuff
and show it to you, 'cause I think it's cool.
I think people are inventing really interesting solutions
to problems and sharing them with everybody.
And that is a good thing.
And I'm also really interested to know if you have one
or have access to one.
What have you printed that's been useful?
Drop a link down in the comments below.
I wanna know what has been useful to you.
All right, I'm gonna leave it there, please, please
share your favorite models, ideas, inventions down
in the comments below, but for now I'll say
thank you so much for watching,
and I hope you have a great day.