Recently I've been trying to slow down my habits a bit. As a part of that, I'm going back to some old media formats to try and break up the day a little. This process sparked the objectively meaningless question of, can I print these? But before I could find out the answer, I would need some cassettes. And this, as it turned out, was surprisingly difficult. I checked many second-hand stores, but found more cassette players than I did cassettes. Even cashees let me down. So you know what's hot in Australia? When the spiders get out of your car. High five. Finally, I found what I was looking for. A box at a garage sale for a total of five bucks. Now I just needed a model to print. I was prepared to do the cat on my own, but thought surely someone has already modeled a cassette tape. And sure enough, I found this open source model by E-Hands Makes. It's a great model. Very accurate, as you will see, but hadn't quite been optimized for 3D printing. Printing these parts would need a lot of support that would make adding the artwork I wanted to quite difficult. So I went and modified it slightly, cutting it into two pieces and adding some alignment tabs so it could be glued after. This way the parts could be flat and support free. With the model modifications made and tested, I could get on with the fun part, making some of my own designs. Minecraft volumes, alpha and beta are probably my single favourite albums to listen to, so it was the obvious place to begin. In Photoshop, I experiment with a few designs until I find what I'm happy with. The volume alpha design I'm very pleased with, but volume beta was a bit more difficult. The colours are just not as iconic. I make a grid of the same size in fusion. Using this, I make small extrusions that differ in height by one tenth of a layer, one height for each colour I use. I use these to copy the design from Photoshop. With these files, I can move over to Bamboo Studio to prepare the multicolor print. I paint the indents I made previously and because they're less than my layer height, they will all be printed as the first layer. This is a tricky first layer and I had a couple of failures, but it's an easy print from their up. With the shells printed, I can move the parts over from another cassette. I've tried a few different brands and all seem to work well. The original files are optimised for max-well cassettes, but I didn't have any I wanted to sacrifice. Really, I should reduce the amount of tape to the length of the album, but I chose not to because I'm lazy. To copy music to the cassettes took a while to length of the music, which in this case was a bit over two hours. This process did make me feel a bit grateful for a modern tech. But with that done, I was left with some truly unique cassettes. This one is upside down, I fixed that now, but I still think it looks better this way. This was a fun, if pointless project. It's a pretty interesting way to learn about some old tech. I shared my modified files in the description, but I again remind people that I didn't do most of the work. Thank you to my patrons and to you, as always, for watching.