Game Day Is Back: Sideline Gear We Print
Sideline season starts again, which means folding chairs, cold hands, and a phone you need ready for the one play worth filming.
Here's what gets printed before the first game.
The phone problem, first
It's the same every year. Coffee in one hand, a kid's water bottle in the other, phone somewhere in a coat pocket. Something good happens, and you're doing the frantic pocket dig while everyone around you already has it on video.
A wristlet keeps the phone on your wrist, so you can hold a coffee and still be holding the camera. It's a small thing that stops mattering as soon as it's solved, which is the best kind of fix.
The football one is the one people ask for most in August, and it comes off the printer already assembled — no glue, no clips, nothing to lose in the parking lot.
Team colors without extra hardware
The thing people assume needs a multi-material setup and doesn't.
If the colors divide by height, slice the model, scrub the layer slider to where you want the change, and click the color-change icon. The printer pauses, you swap the filament, purge until it runs clean, and resume.
Two-tone in school colors for the cost of a filament swap and a minute of your time. It also wastes dramatically less material than a purge tower does.
What you can't do this way is two colors at the same height — so design around a horizontal break.
Bag and cooler tags
Sideline bags all look the same, especially in a pile behind a bench.
A tag in team colors with a name on it saves the sorting-through routine. Same principle as everything else I make.
Chair and blanket clips
Wind is the enemy of a folding chair with a blanket on it.
Simple clips, printed in PETG because they live outdoors and get sat on. Make them chunkier than feels necessary — thin printed clips snap at the hinge, and that's where all the force goes.
Number charms for the team
For a whole team, jersey numbers are often more meaningful than names.
Print flat so you can batch a plate at once, and if you're embossing numbers, switch the wall generator to Arachne and slow the outer wall — small digits mush otherwise.
Twenty flat charms is two or three plates. An afternoon.
Material, since these live outside
PETG for anything staying in a bag or a car. PLA softens around 60°C, and a car in late August gets well past that. A PLA charm left on a dashboard deforms.
PLA is fine for something that comes inside after every game. PETG if it lives in the sports bag all season.
Print it in August
Every seasonal post says this and it's still true.
Team gear wants to exist before the first game, not during week four. A couple of evenings now beats a rushed Friday, and the printer will absolutely choose the rushed Friday to have a problem.
Whose colors am I printing this season? Drop the team below — I keep a list and I do work through it. 🏈