Intro

A common refrain when it comes to 3D printers, is "yes, but what is it useful for?". Unless you have a clear aim like printing miniatures for your DnD game, or moulds for a Radio Control Airplane. For a lot of people who get a 3D printer, after a short burst when it's new printing benchies, a few novelty sculptures, and maybe a vase or two, the novelty wears off and the printer sits in a corner gathering dust.

While I don't own an FDM (that's the ones that use filament) 3D printer, I am lucky enough to have access to a couple of different 3D printers via my membership of Makerspace Leiden. Here we have a Bambu P1S, and an Ultimaker 2+ (There's a couple of others, but they aren't in fully working condition). Over the past few months I've been using it to make some quality of life improvements to some Ikea shelves I have in my home.

This post is about some of those prints.

The problem space

I have a number of Ikea IVAR shelves in my apartment. They are a really versatile, affordable shelving system that allows for lots of options. The system is built around vertical uprights made from pine wood that measure 44mm x 34mm with holes on one side for 6mm pins. There are cross braces between the two verticals of a given upright, and then a wire cross brace used between the uprights themselves to keep the shelves together. The holes for the pins are 30mm apart, centre to centre. This allows for a very configurable system with pins put into the holes, then shelve, cupboards, etc... hanging off the pins. Great stuff.

Alas there's areas it could be better. One of the problems I have had was with the book shelf where I have a number of paperback books These are quite short books, and on the standard 300mm deep Ivar shelves, if you have multiple shelves above each other at the right height for the books, it becomes very dark on the shelf with access to the books also being a faff. The ideal solution would be a half depth shelf, alas ikea don't make one. Fortunately with a 3d Printer, there are available designs for brackets that work with the Ikea IVAR shelf system so you can make your own.

The space between the uprights becomes just wasted space in many cases as there's just nothing that can go there. The's a space between shelf planks so it can't easily be used as a continuous shelf. There are various designs available on printables/thingiverse/makerworld that provide a sort of bucket/bin type container in this space, but they almost all use the wood cross braces as their attachment point. They also reach outside the 44mm wide space of the uprights. Decidedly suboptimal.

Finally I needed a way to stop my books falling over... (that wasn't just buying more books...)

Useful 3D prints

In the picture above I've used three different 3D printed designs to help solve these problems.

Starting with the half depth shelf. If you look closely at the picture, there's three brackets visible, two in grey and one in blue (on the right). They are using this bracket I found via printables. The design is by the user @MadeByCat. I printed it on the Bambu P1S using their ownbrand basic filament, the default settings apart from my preferred gyroid infill style, 15% infil, and no support. Paired with a pine shelf plank I got from a DIY store, and some wood screws. This got me a nice 150mm deep shelf that fills half the depth of the Ivar shelf. Giving me plenty of visibility of the books on the lower shelf, while giving me extra space above. The exact height was a trade off between maximium amount of books I could fit, and being able to access the light switch...

The next useful print is on the left of the picture. Or if you prefer, a close up:

This one is my own design, and my first that I've published on printables. I designed it in openscad. It's nothing complicated, a large bucket element I can store stuff in, the means for the Ivar pins to fit in and hold it up, and a couple of vertical holes that are just the right size for a USB-C plug to be fed up so I can run wiring if needed. It's held in place with some extra pins I got from Ikea. If you ask nicely at the service desk they are usually happy to give you some extras, else you can just use a 6mm diameter length of steel cut to size and deburred. This bucket has been really useful, a great way of using what would otherwise be dead space. I printed it on the Bambu P1S in the ownbrand basic pla, 15% infill. I did use support this time, with the top layer of the support using the Bambu PLA/PETG support material. But I think it would work just as well using pla for support.

Finally I needed to stop my books falling over, I needed a bookend. I found this one on printables. It works ok, it's not perfect, I think it's designed for a slightly thicker shelf plank than I'm using. But it works reasonably enough. It stops my Dinosaur Philosophy and cloud collector's handbook from falling over, obstructing the light switch, which is all I wanted. I might have a go at making a better alternative in the future, but for now it works.

Final thoughts.

While none of these prints are enough to justify buying a printer if you don't already have one, they have prooved very useful for me as someone who has access to a printer already. The shelf bracket alone has been a great quality of life improvement for the Ikea Ivar shelves.

(Oh and for those of you wondering about the squirrel in the top photo, it's this Squirrel Guardian printed on an Anycubic Photon Mono 4K, using anycubic grey resin. It's hollowed out, with a drain hole in the base).