When maker and engineer Replayreb came up with the idea of selling lightsaber pen tops on eBay and Etsy, he knew he’d need a way of creating more than just one print at a time.

First, he tried printing multiple pen tops at once but found that the results weren’t as good as when he printed just one at a time. Annoyingly, he explains that each print takes 30 minutes which meant he always had to be “on call” to remove the model and manually start printing the next.

So, to solve this problem, Replayreb came up with an ingenious hack to make sure he could continue printing even when he’s not around. He explains on Thingiverse: “I wrote a Winbatch script that prompts you to select a gcode file and asks how many copies you want to print. Then it takes that gcode file and pastes multiple copies of it into another file and inserts some gcode in between the copies called eject.gcode.”

The eject.gcode first homes the print head, then raises the Z-axis by just a couple of milimeters. Finally, the head moves to knock the printed model off the print bed.

However, Replayreb points out that this hack isn’t a “turn-key solution” and you’ll need some understanding of g-code to “trick” your printer. As well as this, the process only works with small models that have a small base and can easily be pushed off the print bed.

But, if you can overcome these complications, it’s a pretty neat hack. And, of course, you can’t remove every print from the bed. But watch how the print head easily knocks off the 3D model into a box in the video below: