If you’re fed up with shovelling money into a printing company to ensure you always have enough business cards, we some good news: you can now avoid doing this.
Allow us to introduce this little 3D printed “Pocket Business Card Press” that embosses your important information onto a piece of paper or card instead of using any ink.
The mechanism here is deceptively simple: two cylinders with mirrored text joined by herringbone gears and a frame to hold everything together and keep sufficient pressure on the business cards.
This is the fourth revision of the design. If you want to see how the designer arrived at this result you can see an explanation video on YouTube.
Get this design on Thingiverse
There’s a catch. If you want one of these to work you’re going to need to be handy with CAD software so you can properly edit in your required text and pictures, and you’ll need to print with a material that will not only recreate the details, but also be hard enough to be legible after many uses.
This also isn’t going to replace all your printed business cards, unless you use a tiny amount of them or don’t mind spending a lot of tiny cutting and embossing.
Despite that’s, it’s still an awesome idea and it would be great to show off to clients or to keep on your desk for when you run out of cards and don’t feel like ordering more.
Other interesting 3D prints you can get for free:
- 3D print Ahsoka Tano’s lightsabers from Star Wars Rebels
- Turn a Coke bottle into a GoPro flotation device for free
- Make your phone charger look like a Pokémon GO Pokédex with this 3D print
- Make a Defender of the Universe with this 3D printed Voltron
- McCree from Overwatch gets a fan-made 3D printed revolver