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Printing something fun for my daughter

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My younger daughter asked me to if I could print something for her she'd originally seen on Reddit to help her decorate her fingernails using magnetic nail polish (who knew that was a thing?).  It was a 3D printed magnetic spinner that holds a horseshoe magnet .  The original posting directed me to the STL files I needed to print this gadget , designed by a user "destiny84" on cults3d.com. I printed the parts using different colored PLA filament I had laying around. After ordering the bearings needed to allow the handle to turn (they go in the two round openings above) I assembled it and glued on a washer to hold the magnet: Our daughter came home for the 4th of July but forgot to bring her nail polish so sent me the following pictures and video once she got home and used it.  I also uses a brand of magnetic polish called Mooncat (mooncat.com), and I printed a holder (below, left) to hold the square bottle of polish at a convenient angle. She didn't have enough hand...
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Retired at last!

So I finally retired on May 8th after 14+ years working at my latest gig.  The last thing I did before retiring was write a research paper summarizing our last five years worth of research and software development in personalized medicine, which I submitted for publication a week after formally retiring.  We just found out last week that the paper has been accepted for publication in the journal, Cancers.  I'll add a link as soon as it's available in preprint. After retiring we went to Iceland for almost two weeks.  Incredible.  There's nothing more I can say.  Go see the country if you ever get a chance.  Wonderful, welcoming people, a stunningly beautiful country with volcanoes, glaciers, strange animals (we saw hundreds of puffins!) and 23 hours and 28 minutes of daylight! Other than traveling I've been focusing on spending lots of time with our grandson and kids, planning more trips, baking sourdough (bread, English muffins, baguettes, bagels, etc....
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So, what else have you been printing, Larry?

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The past month has involved two types of 3D printing projects:     - Printing Grateful Dead license plate frames and  coasters for my wife to give to friends, and     - Printing parts for my grandson's Brio train. My 2 year-old grandson is infatuated with trains, and I'm hoping this will soon lead to him getting interested in building rockets with Papa in a few years.  We were given a nice, "gently used" train set after our neighbor's children outgrew it but I saw some designs online I wanted to build to customize the layout for my grandson. First, I found a cute tunnel with the track by a user named alchemic on Thingiverse : Next, I found a bridge that looks kind of like a miniature Golden Gate Bridge by a user, RICie on Printables.com .  This required several days of printing and a couple of tries to print the curved, ascending track correctly but it turned out nicely and supplements certain pieces of track we didn't have.  I rearranged the tra...
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Moonliner!

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The NY Times published a great article last week, " These Rocketry Hobbyists Are Not Just Playing Around ".  I agree! When I was a kid we used to drive from Phoenix to visit my Uncle Larry in Pasadena, California, for summer vacation and our family would go to Disneyland.  Back then, there was a "futuristic" rocket in Tomorrow Land, based on a design by Dr. Verner von Braun.  I'd forgotten about it until we visited my best friend in Kansas City and saw this on the roof of the old TWA headquarters in downtown KC: Old pictures I've seen showed the TWA logo on either side of this Moonliner rocket. When we got back, I started looking for ways to build this rocket!  There was a company offering a model of the Moonliner, but they stopped producing them because of family health issues.  Then I heard about the Washington Aerospace Club's 2025 Moonliner project to build a 30 inch diameter, 22 foot tall Moonliner !  They successfully launched their monster in Sep...
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So, they sold out the big rocket I wanted (Mega Der Red Max) so I decided to print my own!

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Long time, no post ....  Here's some of what I've been up to in the past few months: Estes surprised everyone (at least me) when they announced at the end of July that they were selling a 4" diameter  Pro Series II™ Mega Der Red Max™ Model Rocket , using a 3-Engine Cluster.  I anguished for a couple of weeks about whether to buy one and they sold out before I decided to buy one.  I should have recognized the "Limit 2" next to the order button meant they hadn't made a lot of them. After a month or so had passed, I saw someone on The Rocketry Forum  discussing 3D printing the Mega DRM so I reached out to "frogglicker" (David Frey) who generously shared the STL files he'd developed .  He designed a custom 2 piece nose cone for me, based on a file I made with OpenRocket.  Estes was selling the 4" body tube used in the Mega DRM so I bought two (just for fun and possible future projects ). OpenRocket simulation of my Mega Der Red Max in flight w...
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So, what have you been doing lately?

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Well, I haven't been doing much rocketry so far this year.  We've spent a lot of time babysitting our grandson, watching him for almost two weeks while his parents were out of the country earlier this year.  We took road trips to visit friends in South Carolina, Georgia and Minnesota.  We spent a long weekend visiting our daughter in Philadelphia this summer.  I've also discovered sourdough, isolating my own starter in March and regularly baking bread and other things with sourdough discard (English muffins, bagels, flatbreads, crackers, etc.).  I've also made fresh baguettes using sourdough starter, which turns into an all day project! I've been reprinting several copies of my four color license plate frame after the one I made for my wife melted when the car was parked in direct sunlight.   It took several tries, but I've substituted black PETG for the black PLA used to build the main part of the license plate.  PETG withstands higher temperatures th...
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Looking back on 2024

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Well, it's been an exciting year.  In addition to becoming a grandfather and going to half-time at work, I started the year learning to use my new 3D printe r .  I've used the printer to build rockets that are no longer available, learned how to combine my OpenRocket skills to 3D print novel or experimental rockets as well as printing things for my wife's gardening hobby, printing things inspired by her love of the Grateful Dead and printing things for my daughters.  For Halloween, some of our neighbors had rats (we think it's caused by the construction of Northwestern's new football/concert stadium) so we were asked by our Village not to put out real pumpkins.  As a solution, I 3D printed a Grateful Dead-themed Halloween pumpkin: I'm currently printing a (late) Grateful Dead-themed Christmas present for my wife.  This is my first four color 3D print, based upon what I learned printing multicolor coasters for Valentine's Day for my wife.  This involves pri...
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