While I was looking around for something to post for last week’s Market Watch, I came across a number of interesting BIONICLE items. One of the things that caught my interest were some 3D printed masks from this eBay seller for 8 bucks each, or about $12.10 after shipping. Just looking at our MOC section on Discord, it’s clear that there is a demand for custom masks, and I’m regularly seeing masks made in 3D printers on their creations.

A decent consumer 3D printer costs upwards of 400 bucks, and a spool of basic filament can be as cheap as 20 bucks. You probably don’t need expensive filament to make masks, but you need a good bit of time, and maybe even an enclosure to vent out the fumes from some of the materials you would be printing with. You also need a bit of know-how to set the printer up, tune the temperature to the plastic and set up the in-fill and support structures for the print, just off the top of my head. You might even have to pay for a file to print, if you’re not proficient enough to create your own 3D models.

Once someone has all this stuff figured out, printing a mask probably only costs pennies, and you can get quite a few masks out of a single spool of any material. In the long run, if you can find a decent 3D printer and get it running properly, then it’s paid for itself after printing as few as 33 masks when you divide the price of a basic 3D printer with the cost of buying and shipping a printed mask from an online seller. However, if a custom mask isn’t something you plan on needing often, or you want to see what a 3D printed mask is like before investing, $12.10 and some tax might be a small price in comparison.