Tobold's Blog
Monday, November 30, 2020
 
Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth token holder

I have played a lot of Gloomhaven over the past weeks, and now decided to try the next board game on my list, which is Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth, or JIME for short. Now JIME has a lot less tokens than Gloomhaven, so I don't need to buy a special insert to store them. But rather than using plastic bags or a tackle box as storage solution, I custom printed the custom token holder below:
I haven't finished printing the cover yet, nor put in the little magnets in the holes you can see on the top. But you can imagine the final product both storing the tokens in the box, and sitting next to the board during play for easy access to all the tokens you need.

The reason I show this is because to me this symbolizes the opportunities and limitations of 3D printing. Yes, I can 3D print a highly specialized object, fitting exactly some very narrow need of the moment. I used an existing design, but an object like this is easy enough that I could design one myself if needed. It took nearly 5 hours to print, and I'll only ever need one of them. I don't know how many copies of JIME sold, Board Game Geek lists 14k community members owning one; but obviously there isn't a huge market for a part like this.

An injection molding machine could make a part like this in about 3 seconds, and produce thousands per day. Nobody does that, because there isn't a market for thousands of these things. 3D printing is useful for objects where you only need one or a few of. But if you read somewhere that 3D printing is the future of manufacturing, you should watch some videos on YouTube showing an injection molding machine spewing out 72 bottle caps every 3 seconds. A lot of plastic parts, from packaging to children's toys, are made in the thousands or even millions, and that cannot possibly be replaced by 3D printing. In fact, I would have a hard time 3D printing a single bottle cap, because the thread would be hard to do, the PLA I printed the token holder with would probably be too stiff for a bottle cap, and the material isn't even approved for food contact. I had plastic parts breaking in my household, for example the filter holder of my coffee machine, where it was easy enough to order a $10 replacement from the internet, while printing it would have been extremely hard, and not safe for food contact. In short, 3D printing certainly has "a" future, but it also certainly isn't "the" future of manufacturing.

Comments:
P.S. I have no idea why the sidebar to the right causes posts with an image to have a large white space, with the image only appearing after the end of the sidebar. Sorry, amateur hour, much of the template of this blog was written by myself, and I am not very good at HTML.
 
It's "clear:both" in div style (which forces image and other divs after it to dodge sidebar).

You probably only need clear:left, if not clear:none.
 
Oh, thanks a lot @Shalcker. I was able to find an fix it! Strangely not part of the template, but of the style automatically applied when I import images.
 
I disagree that 3d printing is not the future. Maybe not of mass market plastics, but 3d printers can do lots more than plastic. Here's one that uses concrete to print houses: https://youtu.be/wCzS2FZoB-I
 
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