I like objects that are made, not bought. My office monitor sits on a stand with three 3D-printed legs threaded onto a row of wooden dowels — something I’d designed once, printed, and never expected to touch again. Then I raised the monitor arm and the stand needed to grow with it. The problem was I don’t model. No CAD, no Blender, not even Tinkercad past a tutorial. So I measured the thing I already had and handed the numbers to Claude.
Measuring the Thing I Already Had
Before asking for anything, I pulled real numbers off the physical stand: 22 mm dowels with 0.29 mm of fit clearance, six of them on a 34 mm pitch, a 90 mm leg height, 20 mm thickness. The two outer legs get blind pockets on their outer faces so the dowel ends stay hidden; the middle leg gets clean through-holes because nobody sees it. That asymmetry is easy to miss if you’re guessing dimensions instead of measuring them, and it’s exactly the kind of detail that makes a print either look finished or look like a prototype.
A Generator, Not a Model
The obvious ask was “make this 22.5 mm taller.” What I actually wanted was never having to ask again. So the brief became: rebuild all three legs from scratch, every time, from whatever height and dowel count I type in — don’t hand me a static STL, hand me the thing that makes the STL. There’s a “Reset to measured original” button sitting right in the parameters panel for exactly one reason: so I can always get back to the dimensions I physically verified, no matter how far I’ve dragged a slider chasing a different height.
Checks I Didn’t Know To Ask For
This is the part that actually surprised me. I asked for a taller leg. Claude gave me a taller leg plus a set of manufacturing checks I never specified: wall thickness from each hole to the edge, the web width between adjacent dowels, the back-wall thickness behind each blind pocket, and a bed-fit check against the specific Bambu Lab printers I own — P1S/X1C, A1, A1 mini, H2S.
The bed-fit check doesn’t just flag red — it tells you the fix in plain English: drop to 6 dowels instead of 8, or tighten the pitch to 31.4 mm, or split the leg at the midpoint and print two halves. That’s the difference between a warning and a tool that respects your time.
I hadn’t thought to ask for any of this. I just wanted my legs taller. What I got was something that actively stops me from printing a part that would crack down the middle of a wall that’s 1.2 mm thick.
What This Actually Is
Under the hood it’s one self-contained HTML file — three.js for the live orbiting 3D preview, hand-rolled polygon triangulation for the actual solids, and a dimensioned SVG elevation drawing that reads like a real technical sheet, title block and all. Toggle exploded view, spin the turntable, hide the dowels to check wall thickness by eye, then export three binary STLs — left, middle, right — named with the exact dowel count and diameter baked in, so two iterations never silently overwrite each other. No build step, no dependencies beyond a CDN script tag. I can open it on my phone.
You can try it yourself: Dowel Leg Generator.
The Real Tool
tools-i-use-daily is mostly about the software I touch every day. This is the same idea pointed somewhere I didn’t expect it to go — Claude Code writes my scripts and refactors my codebases; Claude on the web modeled my furniture. Same tool, different door. The unlock was never “make me a taller leg.” It was measuring what I already had precisely enough that Claude could build the thing that generates the leg, forever, for free.