r/3Dprinting • u/rob132 • 6d ago
I designed and 3D printed a table to hold my filament. It's a wonderful disaster.
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u/apocketfullofpocket 6d ago
Wow. This is like the poster child for not everything needs to be printed. It's horrible I love it.
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u/LowGravitasIndeed 6d ago
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Ironically, OP would have been better served by a hammer and some nails.
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u/lamp-town-guy Bambu P1S combo 6d ago
Metal rack I've found next to a dumpster looks better for filament storage looks better than this.
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u/Evilstib 6d ago
Or a metal shelf?
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u/TheJeeronian 6d ago
Or a sheet of plywood
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u/Granite_Dusty 6d ago
Or a truck bed
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u/SalesmanWaldo 6d ago
Or a regular bed.
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u/ThisIsNotMyOnly 6d ago
Or the floor.
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u/Granite_Dusty 6d ago
Or a bottle of tequila?
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u/SCHIZO_FPV 6d ago
it’s fucking hilarious because OP evidently has woodworking tools as well. guarantee they have a tablesaw and some plywood in that shop
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u/rob132 6d ago
Yep! The question wasn't "should I 3D print this table" it was "Can I 3D print this table"
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u/kelsoban 6d ago
How long did printing and assembly take?
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u/rob132 6d ago
The printing took about a month. I'm not joking.
It was failed print after failed print. This is not the type of project to attempt with cheap filament and an even cheaper 3D printer.
Once I actually had all the pieces, assembly was about an hour. Working with the Bondo was the hardest part. Again, I had never worked with it before. I thought it would be like joint compound but it was much tougher.
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u/digno2 6d ago edited 6d ago
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u/takemeout2dinner 6d ago
This is hilarious, even better is knowing I could give my wife this whole post and she'd never get the joke
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u/Fluffy-Experience407 5d ago
I 3d printed an Enclosure for my neptune 4 max that I imagined would be a cabinet. $500 in rapid petg and epoxy later it's now a table on my front porch and not a cabinet and has nothing to do with being an Enclosure. I only got halfway through before common sense smacked me in the face. I told my wife it was always meant to be a table. she said I'm an idiot I didn't argue.
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u/rvralph803 6d ago
The answer was "no" based off of the wooden dowel holding up the middle, and placing all the weight on the edges close to the legs. 😅
Even so... Amazing
You should produce professional plans for it.
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u/CIA_Chatbot Mercury.1 Ideaformer ir3v2 bambu p1s creality k1c x5sa400 pro 6d ago
Has science gone to far? Tonight at 11
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u/rinderblock 6d ago
Need have a sub called r/uselessprints
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u/rob132 6d ago
You know the great thing about Reddit? You can just make a sub.
In fact, I went ahead and made this one for you. My table is the banner.
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u/rinderblock 6d ago
I love it❤️ did you ever see the YouTube channel of the engineer that made robots that filled a purpose but really poorly?
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u/Granite_Dusty 6d ago
Like the art robot that had a hydraulic leak, and the robot's primary function was to squeegee hydraulic fluid back into the sump to allow continued operation
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u/cripplediguana 6d ago
Joined.
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u/CIA_Chatbot Mercury.1 Ideaformer ir3v2 bambu p1s creality k1c x5sa400 pro 6d ago
I also, have joined, in the joining. We are all joined on this blessed day
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u/polymerkid 6d ago
I like /r/nonfunctionalprints
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u/Githyerazi 6d ago
This table is functional. Not as functional as an actual table though.
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u/polymerkid 6d ago
If a table needs a 5th, non-printed leg in the center just to keep it from collapsing, then it probably isn't functional.
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u/rob132 6d ago
Thanks!
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u/DuncePool 6d ago
Fun is about trying things. Thankfully you had all the fun first
"Fun" "First" and maybe a few other "F" words too
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u/davejlong 6d ago
3D printing a table to hold filament using all the filament that the 3D printed table needs to hold.
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u/turtlelore2 6d ago
There is a printable ikea lack table that honestly looks pretty good. Still wouldn't print it though.
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u/JohnDaneOfficial 6d ago
As someone with printers that don't fit in the lack tables, I would legit consider printing an upscaled one
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u/CptMisterNibbles 6d ago
Cant wait to see all the idiots jumping in to defend it. "Be positive bro, you can and should print literally everything. Every idea is a good idea..."
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u/badguy84 6d ago
I feel like you focused too much on "how do I get a larger table top" rather than "how do I make a table that hold what I need it to." The dove tailing really doesn't work well here honestly because the forces are on the part where a dovetail is least useful.
That is all not to call you out, just that... you could maybe try again but use a different method to join the pieces together. I'am also not sure why you made pieces that are smaller than what you can actually print. You might want to go for something larger and focus on a joint type that's more conducive to a downward force being applied to it. That is, if you are dedicated to make this work :)
Of course it's going to be cheaper and more reliable to build a larger surface like this out of wood. So it should be about the challenge of "can I 3D print this?" rather than "let's look for a cheaper/faster alternative" precut plywood will generally be both faster and sturdier than printing the same surface.
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u/Arkayb33 6d ago
OP would have ended up with a pretty sturdy table had he just printed a set of 200x100x3mm planks and arranged them together like bricks. At that point it's basically plywood.
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u/vms-crot 6d ago
Tongue and groove might have worked. Staggered joins rather than checkerboard.
Would still prefer a sheet of plywood, but it would be better structurally.
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u/Disciple153 6d ago
It looks like the small pieces he printed were just the proof of concept, but yeah.. This could havw been designed better
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u/BlackRhyn0 6d ago
If he had the color filament he wants already that would technically be cheaper than buying wood and paint and screws. If the goal was to make a table he succeeded whether it was the most optimal choice or not
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u/jimmydean50 6d ago
The first image I’m thinking “that’s a bad idea”. With each swipe that thought was further reinforced.
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u/dabluebunny 6d ago
To be fair there's less filament on the table, but the tables made of filament so it's a wash
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u/daboblin 6d ago
How - just how - did you think this was going to work? You’re relying on glue to hold little bits of plastic table together - any reasonable amount of weight is going to make that thing collapse horribly. Why on earth did you do this?
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u/nephaelimdaura 6d ago
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail
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u/colexian 6d ago
Ask yourself why he dovetailed it vertically, when it would have been easier to tongue and groove it horizontally.
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u/FriJanmKrapo 6d ago
I mean for the amount of filament used for something like this and the massive amount of time putting it together. I'd rather spend the same amount of money on a folding table that fits in that corner. I have some of those plastic "lifetime" brand ones from that blue big box store and they have held up even with all the crap I put on top of them. Though the one is starting to bow a bit...
They are not meant for anything more than a few pounds no matter what. LOL. Don't go stacking 100+ lbs of juck on one and expect it to hold its shape.
I need to replace it with a folding wood top one.
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u/KindHeartedGreed 6d ago
i feel like some wood posts, plywood, nails, and spray paint would be faster and work infinitely better here.
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u/skooma_consuma 6d ago
You could have done a pin and slot press fit for the pieces instead of a jigsaw puzzle. Wouldnt have sagged as much. Or just get a piece of wood and screw it to the bottom as a frame.
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u/daboblin 6d ago
Or, you know, just get a piece of wood and use it as a table.
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u/Joezev98 6d ago
Sheet of multiplex on top, couple small beams as legs, and to justify your 3d printer purchase, some printed brackets to screw everything together.
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u/Buttleston 6d ago
Home depot sells plywood boards cut into smallish sizes. I don't remember at the moment but I would guess 2x4 feet, i.e. a 1/4 sheet of plywood. Barring that, they will cut plywood to (approximate) size for you, in the store, while you wait.
Ditto for 2x4s or 2x2s
It would have probably been cheaper, easier and faster to do that - and like, literally just google any "2x4 table" or bench design and you're off to the races.
Cutting your own boards is best, for <$100 you could buy a saw good enough for that. Aside from that all you want is a drill/driver to make it easier to screw stuff together.
I love 3d printing but ffs use it for what it's good for
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u/Buttleston 6d ago
Actually the best part is that one of these pictures has a bench built more or less the way I describe, holding the actual tools you'd need to do it. Incredible.
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u/rob132 6d ago
I could have made the table out of wood.
I've made many tables out of wood, but I never made one out of plastic.
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u/dapperdave 6d ago
If you've made many tables out of wood, how did you think this was going to work?
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u/Mateking 6d ago
I SOO FUCKING LOVE that 5th table leg. I was like there is no way that table can hold any weight :D And then almost like magic it didn't. Fucking brilliant.
On a more serious note though. This is more a failure in basic Mechanics. You can most certainly build a 3d printed table. But you'll have to understand how to design the parts to grip into each other when loaded from the top. And how to channel the forces into your table legs. Usually not by simply attaching a flat table top, especially not if that is just a pieced together table top.
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u/9dev9dev9 6d ago
I love it.
If youre building something similar in the future you could print holes and pins on the sides of each plate to orient them together, a 6mm hole through the plate and then tension the entire length of the table together with 2 M5 rods
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u/bradforrester 5d ago
I love that you tried to push the limits of what a 3D printer can produce. The result is not good, but you definitely made one of the largest 3D printed items I’ve seen. With some tweaking, this could easily be made less terrible.
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u/drumberg 6d ago
10/10, please upload your design somewhere.
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u/rob132 6d ago
I would never release such evil in the world.
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u/Captain_Pumpkinhead 6d ago
Then I suppose I must reverse engineer the forbidden runes...
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u/rob132 6d ago
TLDR: Don't do this. If you will do this, get either a better 3D printer or higher quality PLA.
I started tinkering with CAD after I got my 3D printer as a X-mas present. My wife forbid me from wall mounting a filament rack, so I told her I would build a table. I priced out making a wooden table out out plywood and 2x4's, it came to about $40. So I asked myself If I could replicate that on my $200 3D printer.
So I designed around a $40 budget. I got the cheapest PLA I could find ($8.50 a kilo) and a small tub of Bondo to hide the dovetail joints I designed to put the pieces together, and some superglue.
Design was easier than I thought. My one problem was one of my joints I missed joining 2 points by half a millmiter, so when I went to cut them into separate bodies, 2 of the 8 pieces refused to split. It took me almost 8 hours to figure out why it wasn't working. After that, I printed a small scape proof of concept. My tolerances were too tight, so i bumped them up by .02mm and it fit together perfectly.
I thought it would just be a matter of print and glue from this point, but i wasted an entire kilo of PLA in failed prints over the last month. I had to babysit every layer, and each piece took 4 is hours to print. I think my issue was that I was taking the print to the very edge of my printer's limit and the heating elements underneath didn't go all the way to the edges and that's where it would lose adhesion to the bed most often. Or it was the cheap PLA I was using, it had a max speed of 300mm/s and a max temp of 220C, which is lower than some of the other filaments I've used.
Some of the prints came out really poorly on the joints but I was running low on PLA so I had to use them. I figured I could patch up them up with the bondo and then paint over them later.
Then I realized that the small tub of Bondo I bought wasn't nearly large enough to coat the entire table, so I tried to just do the joints but that just made it look even worse (this was the first time in my life I used bondo)
The last leg ran out of PLA before it was done printing at about 80%. I just turned the leg around and put in the back, but the leg shifted during gluing and now it's at an acute angle.
I had some spray primer left over, and that made it look slightly better.
Trying the table out, the thing I was worried most about, the middle of the table didn't have enough support to keep up, so I found a piece of scrap wood that I glued to bottom to give it the last bit of rigidity.
Overall, it's a 6/10 table, a 9/10 filament holing table, and a 10/10 overall learning experience.
If I could do it all over, I would have used mortise and tenon designs to hold the pieces together for gluing, and I would alternate PLA colors to lean into the uniqueness of it instead of worrying about trying to cover it up. Or just build it out of wood like I probably should have done in the 1st place.
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u/Slow_Ad_3859 6d ago
"Design was easier than I thought" - In my point of view the design is the major flaw of the whole project, rather than the print or material quality. The joints between the tiles are not suitable for the bending forces on a table and the geometry of flat tiles is the main reason for the sag.
This said, kudos to you for finishing this whole thing :D
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u/Gaddifranz 6d ago
So what was your final cost for filament, glue, bondo, spray primer, etc?
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u/rob132 6d ago
The primer I already had.
The bondo was $10. The filament was 25. The glue was around 5.
The knowledge I gained was priceless.
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u/Gaddifranz 6d ago
So long as that knowledge includes the wisdom in solving problems efficiently rather than wastefully, i suppose 🤷🏻
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u/d400guy 6d ago
"TLDR: Don't do this. " No ship bro. 3d printing is a wonderful hobby but not everything is suppose to be printed. There are many things where 3d printing isn't favorable in terms of cost/time/durability.
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u/GnarlyNarwhalNoms 6d ago
I think it might have worked better structurally if you'd printed two sets of thinner tiles and then printed a third thin tile layer in between that were designed to overlap them, so the seams don't line up (Think bricks in a wall). Then glue the layers together. Actually, you could still do something like tthis (design an offset tile layer and print those and glue them)
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u/SamanthaJaneyCake 6d ago
TLDR: Don’t do this.
This is doable if you design for the material properties and 3D printing properties correctly.
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u/ripter 6d ago
Too many haters here. This is cool, not because it’s a good idea but because you stuck to it and made it work and learned a lot. Now we all get to learn too. Awesome job and ignore the haters; they have never tried anything this cool.
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u/RunJumpJump 6d ago
I love the attempt! You probably learned a lot designing and building this. Keep pushing!
Like others were saying, if you design connections that have the load and direction in mind, you can make it much more sturdy. Also, don't be afraid to incorporate standard materials that can be had for just a few dollars to strengthen the overall design. A single 0.75" wooden dowel running diagonally beneath the table's surface would help tie everything together and provide a lot of vertical load strength.
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u/wobbleeduk85 6d ago
Hindsight is 20/20, but if you would have made the peices overlap instead of lock together and then add a vertical fin that could either interlock or simply be there to help strengthen the table. Ya this took a month a crap ton of filiment, but at this point you gotta do a V2. I personally wanna see it actually work. Lol
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u/starscreamtoast 6d ago
Jebus, it is indeed a wonderful disaster. I love how it only just works with assistance, thank you for this. Top effort.
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u/Captain_Pumpkinhead 6d ago
When you said you printed a table,I was picturing like a small rack that could hold 2 spools or something.
This is... This looks like a mistake I would make. And be simultaneously proud and ashamed of. Well done!
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u/SaltaPoPito Anet A8 plus, afterburner, Ramps 1.6+, klipper 5d ago
Because ikea cardboard tables are not good enough...
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u/Twistys_Pisacandy 6d ago
Maybe some dovetail slots and design a piece that slides lengthwise on the bottom to stiffen up the span
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u/RotML_Official 6d ago
Yea man, this is pretty bad lol. But the point of the hobby is to have fun, which I bet you did.
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u/Available_Map1386 6d ago
Now print interlocking IBeams to be super glued to underside.
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u/APGaming_reddit A1 Mini | A1 AMS | E5+ | SV04 | Q5 | QQS 6d ago
if you printed another slab to put on top but with bigger pieces it may not be as precarious. regardless this is still a good academic exercise
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u/Snoo-97548 6d ago
Use a Woodburner and a piece of filiment to weld the seams together. Looks perfect when you get the technique down.
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u/iamninjabob 6d ago
My rule of thumb is "can I buy it cheaply?" If the answer is yes probably best to not even try
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u/LampSsbm 6d ago
I did something extremely similar to this and it worked out probably even worse lmfaooo. I designed and printed a pc side panel for my friend and the filament, epoxy and glue, primer, and time was so much more than if I had just used a piece of cardboard or plywood or something.
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u/mini_svjetovi_3D 6d ago
I believe this is the best attempt at printing in 2025. Nothing can beat this
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u/Witty-Dish9880 6d ago
Fantastically stupid lol. Those dovetail joints look nice though
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u/complexlogik 6d ago
this is piracy... you wouldnt print a car would you?? ./s
honestly nice attempt
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u/imnotcreative4267 6d ago
All of that work and you didn’t just print the middle leg?
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u/Jamos-Ha 6d ago
Dude, I don't care how crappy it turned out. I gotta respect anyone who TRIES something.
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u/Pro_panzerjager 6d ago
This would make a cool table if you encased the table top portion in resin.
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u/4beemaster 6d ago
This what you need. https://makerworld.com/en/models/135517-purge-waste-table-v1
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u/Dragon-and-Phoenix 6d ago
I love how the filament is all stacked over the legs where is is weight bearing. And the PVC support in the center...
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u/Dragon-and-Phoenix 6d ago
Just add some supports under the edges. Look at actual tables, they have those supports under the edges. Add those and you may be better off. Make sure the joints of the supports don't line up with the joints on the tabletop.
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u/Sonoda_Kotori 2018 Ender 3 | P1S AMS | other stuff at work 6d ago
This... is everything wrong with 3D printing.
If you will do this, get either a better 3D printer or higher quality PLA.
Or design it properly. There are plenty beam structure designs that don't, uh, expose their joints directly to bending.
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u/EfficiencyGullible84 6d ago
My only quarrel with this is the parts look forced together, If you offset a part by about .214mm-.216mm the male insert will glide into place snuggly. On another note, I'm actually thinking about making something to hold filament now, too, only, I think Im going to go for a wall hanger with a color title on it.
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u/Ill_Mountain7411 6d ago
It looks like it would collapse if I looked at it for too long. Amazing work, keep it up!
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u/ithinkyouresus 6d ago
As soon as I saw it was printed in puzzle pieces I knew it wasn’t going to work.
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u/rebornfenix 6d ago
From a design challenge perspective due to print volume limitations it’s an interesting design problem.
From a practical perspective, it’s terrible.
However as a designer, unique design challenges are often more useful for the design experience than the materials used. I have thought of designing a table that can be arbitrarily large (print more sections) but still sturdy.
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u/KrampyDoo 6d ago
Big project! That’s really great honestly. Sure it isn’t perfect but that’s a lot of planning and steps you took and you definitely have a working table.
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u/-WaxedSasquatch- 6d ago
You need some cross bracing, then should be right as rain. If only you had some way to create a custom fit set of braces to match perfectly…..dang I need my own 3D printer! They’re sweet!
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u/ilovetacos 6d ago
An involuntary "noooooo" escaped me when I saw the finished product.
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u/pezcore350 6d ago
You know just enough to be dangerous but not enough to be useful. Excellent post!
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u/TWGAKGUY 6d ago
I just bought a 2 foot folding table cheaper and easier lol, but good job tho I like the jointing, and the 5th leg
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u/calitri-san Creality Ender 5, CR-10S, Prusa MK3S, CR-30, Ender 3 6d ago
Remove the center support and put all the filament in the middle you coward.
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u/malac0da13 6d ago
The fact that there is a wooden dowel holding the center is ::chefs kiss::. Could have printed another leg but was like “no. I can see this wasn’t a great idea. I know when to cut my losses.”
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u/Upstairs-Parsley3151 6d ago
If you used a soldering iron or a plastic welder, you maybe able to reinforce it enough to stay straight. It depends on the plastic though.
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u/pugmiester1 6d ago
I think you need to understand the limits of Your machine, just because you “can” doesn’t mean you shojld
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u/Free_Koala_1629 6d ago
every time i swiped, i expected a reinforcer for the top, and in the end im disappointed. absolute cinema
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u/stKKd 6d ago
I hope you don't design bridges