Solve your niche problems with 3d printing
In 2014 I had the misfortune of being hit by a car and the good fortune of not dying. However, my right knee suffered a injury that had me on crutches for a few weeks and a cane for sometime after (thankfully I don’t have to use either anymore). While on crutches my left leg was doing a lot of extra work going up and down stairs. My left foot would get incredibly sore and tired.
There are lots of massage balls on the market and many of them are great and helped relieve my foot pain. But all the ones I could find were about the size of a softball. This was too large to carry with me in my backpack.
Wanting the best of both worlds I decided to 3d print my way out of this problem. I had never really worked with software like this before. I tried a few of the free programs and many of them were ok, but they seemed to lack an efficient way to make a small ball with hundreds of little bumps. All of the free software required you to place each bump individually. This made alignment, size, and spacing control next to impossible.
A good friend who is an architect tipped me off to Rhino. They had a free beta for Mac. Rhino was way more powerful and allowed me to execute my design by printing an array of bumps across the surface of the sphere.
I made a bunch of different models ranging in size from .5 to 1.5 times the size of a golf ball. I found the sweet spot for me to be incredibly close to the size of the golf ball. I tried a lot of different distributions of bumps as well, and found 196 (a 14x14 grid transposed onto the sphere) to be a great density on the size I went with.
What I love about them most is that I still use them even thought my left foot is better. They are the perfect size for day hiking, backpacking, and traveling. If you want your own you can grab one in my Shapeways store!
3d printing is super fun and low cost to get started. You can make small models for just a few bucks and get decent software for free. Try it for your own project and make exactly what you need!
