3D Printing Projects Gone Bad – These 3D Deals Should Have Been in the 3D Printing Business Incubator

3D printing is doing ever more new and exciting things, opening up a whole brave new world of home manufacturing and cheap, accessible goods — as well as some amazing things in the lab. It has potential that we’ve only just begun to tap into — and it’s only going to get better.

What we don’t see a lot of, though, is when it fails, which at times, it manages to do spectacularly. From human error through to technical failure, there’s a lot that can go wrong, especially with a new technology that we’re still learning how to use.

But there’s actually a Flickr group for that. The Art of 3D Print Failure, inspired by a 2011 blog post by RepRap documenting his own missteps, is highly entertaining to browse, but also extraordinarily useful. Its purpose is highlighting where and why things went wrong, so that others can avoid the same accidents in the future.

“It may sound odd, but it’s really essential that you fail when doing 3D printing,” he wrote. “It tells you so much about your machine, the boundaries you can operate in and how good or bad things can be. If all you do is print with safe settings or never play with the electronics or firmware, then you are missing so much of this wonderful project.”

Such accidents include the object becoming loose from the printbed (which isn’t uncommon); a glitch in the extruder; unstable printbed temperature; and using the wrong settings. And sometimes things just spectacularly fail for a reason no one can ascertain. Could it be the 3d printing software ?

Whatever their story, we find the resulting objects quite weirdly wonderful. Perhaps someone should start up a sideline in 3D-printed glitch art — we’re sure there’s a market for that somewhere.