Yes, I'm back.

Have been for a bit over half a month. Only to find that the guy I sold my motorcycle to (w/o current registration) left it parked in the street one day while I was on the road, and since he hadn't moved the registration and title over to himself, I ended up with the parking ticket. Oh well. We've mostly got that taken care of.

Posted a model I created a few years back in TinkerCad, as a functional piece of work. Functional in that it serves a purpose and wasn't intended to be a style or craft item. It's a card holder sized to hold a business card. Generally not the card's you hand out, but more a card that you get that you want to place in an easy to find location. When I was growing up, this might have been right next to one of the phones in the house, or on the inside of a shop cabinet in the garage or shop. Perhaps attached to the furnace with the contact information of the people who come in to service and repair your furnace. And in later years A/C systems. This is an alternative to getting magnet sheet to glue on the back of the card, which makes it impossible to make use of the back of the card.

What I use them for is to have my dental and medical appointment reminder cards on the refrigerator door so that both I, and my sister-in-law can keep track of upcoming appointments. Sadly some of my appointments are now giving out remider cards that are half sheets of 8 1/2" x 11" pieces of cardstock. I'm not going to try printing a holder for those, but the idea here could easily be modified for that.

As noted in the model page, I'm willing to share a public link to the model page on TinkerCAD that other TinkerCAD users can use to get a copy and remix for their needs. (Obviously resize for different format cards, or make one that holds several of a card.)

I have 33 pages of 24 models on TinkerCAD. Ok, page 33 most likely has something less than 24 models on it. I'd say that by far most of these models are junk. And that's an impression on my side. I've also got a lot of models that I won't be sharing because they were part of a commission or project for someone else.

And then I started seriously moving over to FreeCAD for most of my model design work. They have finally got a release candidate for version 1.0 out in the wild, and I'm mostly holding off on more serious modeling work until that's gone to the final release. I keep running into bugs in the current 'stable' release, specifically the software crashing in the middle of what should be minor changes to a model. (I'd really like the software to prompt me with a project title, save the design using that project name, or let me know if the name is already in my library of projects and ask if I meant to pick up where I left off on that, and then save any confirmed updates. I don't know if that's one of the things they have included. Perhaps I'm getting too used to software that saves updates pretty much with each keystroke and confirmation.

That said, I hope to be posting more models with more frequency going forwards. Have fun, share joy, and keep on being creative.


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