Cookie Cutter Design Lab

About Cookie Cutter Design Lab

A cake shop in Sydney, an Ender 3, and a lot of cutters nobody had already made.

My wife runs a cake shop in Sydney. That is the whole reason this exists.

I bought a 3D printer for the usual reasons, which is to say no particular reason, and then found that almost everything I actually printed was a cookie cutter. A shape for an order. A name for a birthday. Something the supplier did not stock and would not stock in time.

What I was doing before this

Searching Thingiverse and Printables, mostly. There is a lot on both and very little of it is the specific thing you need on a Tuesday afternoon. You find something close, then it is the wrong size, or the blade is a solid millimetre and a half of plastic that crushes the dough instead of cutting it, or it is a character somebody has traced off a film and you should not be selling biscuits made with it anyway.

So I tried the design tools. The CAD packages could do it, if I wanted to learn CAD. The dedicated cutter sites either did not do the thing I wanted, put it behind an account and a credit balance, or both. Typing a name onto a stamp and having the letters come out legible turned out to be surprisingly hard to find.

At some point the effort of looking exceeded the effort of building. So I built this.

The printer

A Creality Ender 3 v3 SE. It is not the machine anyone recommends when you ask what to buy, and I would like a Bambu one day. Once it was dialled in, though, it has been completely fine.

Every setting in the print guides was worked out on that machine. That is deliberate. If it works on a budget printer with a 0.4 mm nozzle it works on almost anything, and most of the advice online quietly assumes you have something better.

What this is

A tool that turns an image, some typed words, or one of 169 built in shapes into an STL you can print. It runs entirely in your browser. No account, no credit balance, nothing uploaded, and no paid tier holding the good features hostage.

It runs locally because that was the easy way to build it, not because of any principle. The whole thing is Python compiled to WebAssembly, so the same code that runs on my laptop runs in your tab. Once it worked that way, adding a server would have been extra work for no benefit.

What it is not

It is not a business. There is nothing to buy.

It is also not finished. The shape library is drawn by hand in code and some shapes are better than others. The print settings are what work for me, which is not the same as what works for you. If something is wrong, if a cutter prints badly, or if a setting name has changed in the latest slicer, tell me about it. That is the most useful thing you can do with this site.

Make a cutter Send feedback