My 0$ knob
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Why not both. 3D print one and swap them at Home Depot. Or heck 3D print all of them, replace them all, keep the one you need and sell the rest on eBay. If they all match, I doubt Home Depot would even notice.
Some poor sucker is going to eventually buy the display model tho
They'll get an even better deal then given the missing knobs! Or the store will just foot the bill for the replacement knob that they can probably get for less than the consumer price
Well they're available on eBay...
You can dip it in shiny paint too. Its not stainless steel but its good enough
No worries, the OEM ones aren't stainless steel, either. They're "stainless appearance," i.e. plastic with a thin veneer of cheesy chrome plating that's about one molecule thick.
You can electroplate 3D prints by using a basecoat of conductive spraypaint, and then the limit of the thickness of your plating is only really limited by your patience. Nickel is quite easy to do at home.
I quite like electroplating with titanium. Can vary the voltage for some great colors too.
I feel like this parallels the story about spending of $10 million to research and develop a Space Pen vs just using pencils.
The problem with pencils is that in space broken graphite floats around easily and is conductive. A conductive powder floating into something electronic in a pressurized oxygen rich environment is no bueno.
Graphite powder is also quite flammable isn't it?
I'm not sure, but with that much oxygen in the air I'm sure anything could "become" flammable, especially when atomized or turned into a powder. That's why grain silos on farms are fire hazards; the dust.
Had to read like 50 comments and nobody pointed out you can just buy a generic knob for like $1. Hell your used building center would be 50 cents. WTF world do we live in where the solution is CAD and 3D printing for something so trivial. It's like using a nuclear bomb to kill an ant nest.
Look dude, fuck those ants.
Once you have the printer and the knowhow, it takes like 5 minutes to draw and 20 minutes to print at a cost of like 0.10 €
It takes longer to go to a location and buy it at a much higher cost. So why should you?
Its also something you built with your hands and brain. There are few things which feel as good.
Oh yes! The correct answer is to 3D print a plastic knob for the front of an oven. There's not going to be any heat issues there! And no one can deny how beautiful that black knob looks next to the brushed metal.
The knobs on your oven are overwhelmingly likely to be either completely made of plastic or contain a large percentage of plastic already. Typically they're made of ABS or PBT.
PLA probably isn't a good choice for this application but you could absolutely print some knobs in ABS or ASA and you'd be fine. You can even get PBT filament, but that's probably more hassle than it's worth and ABS is cheaper.
There is no single correct answer. There often isn't, in fact.
As for heat: You can treat PLA to be more resistive to temperature and even at stock, untreated, cheapest PLA wont just deform from hot air escaping since the thing melts at 190 and the air wont be that hot for long enough. It may deform with regular use though. You also don't have to use PLA and use something more temp resistive.
Beauty? Eye of the beholder. Its a conversation piece. Its something you point at and say "I made that". Its wabi-sabi, I like it.
190 celsius, I'd like to add.
If it melts, just print another!
The stock knobs are most likely plastic already, but I do agree the black knob looks stupid. It would probably look a lot better to print matching replacements for all of them.
With free returns and having a size difference in my feet I may (or may not) order 2 different sizes of the same shoe and end up returning one.
The same but for my broken Xbox, after a little sticker art.
While I don't do it myself, I don't consider stealing from big name stores theft and am, actually, completely morally fine with it. Will not report somebody stealing even if I see them.
The day big corporations stop stealing from the workers is the day I care about stealing from them. That day will not come.
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LG wants me to pay $45 for a single official replacement.
Amazon has a whole set for $14.
Both are appropriate responses to the bullshit that is oven knobs.
You can save so much money with CAD if you neither factor in your time to actually learn it or the cost of the printer itself.
Makes crime even better in comparison.
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I'd like to take this opportunity to say sorry to all the people that ended up buying the WD-40s I stole the straw off of.
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I learned this from my dad... When I was young, we had a plumbing leak on a Sunday night, p-trap was leaking. All places were closed, so he went to a McDonald's bathroom and stole theirs to replace ours.
20 something years later, my faucet was leaking. It was a discontinued model from a brand owned by home Depot, though they still had the display model up. Remembering what my pa did, I took the display model apart and took what I needed.
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Why are people breaking/losing knobs on their ranges in the first place? I’ve never done that in 4 decades. Seems like an extremely unlikely thing to do.
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I recently re-did my kitchen floor with 1' square peel-and-stick vinyl tiles. After buying four boxes (30 tiles each at $45 a pop), I ended up exactly one tile short. I was sorely tempted to go back to Home Despot and slip one tile out of a box - obviously people do this a lot there since there are always open boxes in the tile section. In the end I just pieced the last tile out of scrap bits, in a spot where it really wasn't obvious. I don't need a fucking shoplifting charge at this stage of my life.
I like this because then the display is broken in the same way it will actually break when someone buys it. It's like warning others of the issue. It's really a public service when you think about it lol
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