Yay 3D Printing!...

I've been wanting to repair my Virtual Boy for some time now. Not the console itself, but the stand for it. There's a little clip that keeps it in place while playing it. That clip, since I bought it off a friend many moons ago, has been broken.

Many attempts to fix it with super glue yields this same result...and I hate it. 

I lived with just having the VB pointing downwards so the front part of the stand that has the hook still in tact takes the grunt of the weight. So, not only do I strain my eyes playing the VB, I also strain my neck. 

Not fun.

Cue a Google search for stand replacements or fixes got me THIS LINK; a possible 3D printed version of of said crappy clip. That got me exited. The 3D file was there, but I didn't have a 3D printer.

I knew a friend of mine had a 3D printer, but after reaching out to him, his printer doesn't do the type of plastic I need for this particular application (his uses PLA, he recommended ABS for what I need). He then pointed me to 3D HUBS. This had a bunch of local 3D print shops in the area that could do the job for me. 

Overly excited, I sent my file in, chose a shop near me to have it printed. The shop owner used a non-high resolution print for the file I sent him. 

The pic he sent me when the job was done looked kinda janky, but I figure for $10, I'll make do with it. 

This was several days ago. I was only able to pick it up today on my day off. I'll have to say that it looked better up in person than in the pic. So I took it home and went to work replacing the part right away.

With a little hobby knife finesse and a bit of patience:

The print, like I mentioned, was pretty much quick and dirty, but if I had my way to redo it, I'd probably would've had it done in higher print resolution.

All in all, I'm happy with how this turned out. It's also exiting that there's a local shop that I can send 3D print files to with great communication.