3D Printed Bullet Journal Stencils

For the Christmas just gone, I got my partner a bullet journal since we'd both been having trouble staying on top of work during the pandemic. I'd kept one for a while at that point but they were new to it so we set to watching a few of the bullet journal YouTube channels until they had a design that they liked. They went with a really clean, almost minimalist design that could be copied out quickly each time they wanted to add a spread.

Except they live with myalgic encephalomyelitis, often awkwardly described as chronic fatigue syndrome. Extreme fatigue alongside other symptoms can make everyday activities difficult or impossible, for them it included struggling to move a ruler around a page to draw a new spread. Even after simplifying the design there were still days where the journal wouldn't get filled in which meant forgotten notes and journal gaps.

Recently, I got an ender 3 which is totally awesome. 3D printing is making a huge impact on people living with disabilities by allowing them to access customized tools that can be downloaded online or made at a computer. Bionics are being made on 3D printers and slashing the cost allowing more people to make use of bionic limbs. For us though, it means we can make specific tools to help them complete regular tasks independently.

Access to a 3d printer, if not in person, through a website that offers on-demand printing.

3D design software, I used tinkercad because it's readily available and great for small tasks like this one.

A bullet journal design

measure the area your spread takes on the page, My partner has a lot of empty space on theirs so I split the weekly spread into 2 separate pieces to save filament. You want to make a box as tall and as wide as you need for thickness. It's worth taking a look at your pen's nib so that you don't make the stencil so thick that the pen can't get to the paper. 3mm worked just fine for my design since the nib was 5mm long.

The easiest way to do this would be to make a box a few mm thick but the same size as your page, that way you could just copy your spread design onto the page and line the stencil up with the papers corner when you want to use it. However, that leads to a lot more filament being used, a longer print time and if you aren't careful the books bindings/other pages might stop the stencil from going just where you want it.

After making the block. click the cube in the top left where it's labeled "TOP" as well as the "switch to flat view (orthographic)" button. Both are circled in the picture on this step. Getting a 2d view just helps to more accurately carve your stencil.

In Tinkercad you can carve lines by creating more blocks where you want holes to go. and selecting the grey and white striped circle to designate it as a hole. this removes material where a hole overlaps a block. Tinkercad has a great tutorial explaining how to do this and it's interactive as well as intuitive.

you're 3D printing, so make it unique. label what the stencils are for or your name across them so that people can return them to you if you lose them. any shape you make in tinker cad can be made into a hole and pressed into the surface of the stencil to engrave it.

Make sure you don't add decoration too close to the gaps or drawing a straight line will be harder. Decorations could poke all the way through the stencil if you wanted it to.

Export to whatever slicer you plan to use to create your .gcode file. You shouldn't need supports for a stencil and I printed on 10% infill and they came out plenty strong. Remember that since these are so thin there won't be much infill anyway. If you're printing on standard quality at 0.2mm a 3mm stencil will only be 15 layers and a few of those are going to be solid walls.

Alternatively, if you're planning to outsource your 3D printing, send the .stl file to whatever organization you're getting your printing done from and follow the instructions they give you.

I use an Ender 3 and this print took a lot longer than expected. I think that was because there's so much of this print which is solid plastic instead of infill. Consequently, it used more filament than I'd hoped for too.

I haven't tested any different options, but when I print more stencils I'm going to play around with reducing wall thickness and see if the stencils are still strong enough.

drawing the first line using the stencil is the only challenge, the gaps are pretty tight so lining it up properly can be a little tricky, maybe 3mm is too thick. after the 1st lines down it's just a matter if using the stencil to finish the horizontal lines and drawing the final 2 lines on the side of the boxes using the edge of the stencil.

The stencils work great, However the vertical lines are a little too tight either because of the bumps caused by the perpendicular gaps or because my printer needs some maintenance.

If your spreads look like these, you can do a whole bunch of them in one go and save your self from making time to add a new spread, which is pretty great if you have a complicated weekly or monthly spread that takes a lot of time.