I’m pretty sure Garyn has known since he was about two and a half that his path would involve making things with his hands. He has always loved machines, LEGOs, electricity, contraptions, and moving parts. His latest acquisition is a new avenue for the construction of things and a very cool melding of computer programming, artistic outlet, and building with his hands. The 3D printer is his current favorite thing ever.
Garyn tracked the printer’s slow journey (no Amazon Prime shipping on this sucker) and realized after it arrived and was assembled, that one piece was the wrong size and he’d have to wait even longer for it’s replacement. But after leveling his “waiting patiently” skill, it arrived and he could start playing.

Luckily, Naomi had already gone on a foray into the world of 3D printing when she bought herself a 3D printing pen. She also bought a huge spool of PLA filament in white to make things she could then paint. Garyn bought the spool from her and away he went. He’s a sweet big brother so his first prints were figures for his sisters. The figures were so cute (a puppy for Naomi, lucky cat for Layna, and a piggy bank for Corra) and they loved painting them (I’m missing a picture of Corra’s Slytherin pig).

He also learned some things:

• the desk is a terrible place to print bigger things because if it wobbles, the whole print gets thrown off and has to be scrapped.
• Printing on the floor is better.
• Printing takes a really, really long time. Longest print to date = 4-5 hours before it failed.
• Sometimes prints don’t want to come off the printing plate. And when that happens, you should look online before giving up and breaking the print to get it off the plate. Turns out people on the internet know things, usually from experience.
• printing accessories for your 3D printer is really satisfying on kind of a meta level. The handle thing above ^^ is what stuck and he had to break off. It was supposed to be a handle for the glass printing plate so you can remove the print without having to wait for it to cool off. Later he printed a filament guide that worked beautifully.

Like with any hobby, there is a whole subculture of amateur-professional 3D printers. They are a subset of “Geek” and the great thing is when they overlap with other subsets of “Geek,” magic becomes available. Garyn and Naomi are both really into the steampunk genre and he found some cool designs for prints to modify classic steampunk goggles that someone made for their steampunk costume. He printed a working/moving aperture for one eye and a weird zoom-looking thing for the other. It turned out so cool! He’s almost done painting them and once they have some gears put on, they’ll be ready for their Halloween debut.

The boy has some pretty big plans for this thing and I’m excited to see if the Minecraft chess set happens, or maybe some D&D figures for the club he’s starting at school. I just love that he’s creating and having fun. Love this kid.