3D Printing Nerd Made 200 Mini Buckets for Felicia Day's Guild Kickstarter

A Last-Minute Comic Con Run

Joel Telling, better known as 3D Printing Nerd, pulled off a tight production run last week. Felicia Day asked if he could print 200 mini poopcorn buckets for the first 200 backers at The Guild movie Kickstarter party in San Diego. He had less than 48 hours.

The buckets are half-scale versions of the full-size popcorn bucket from the Kickstarter video. Day needed them as giveaways for the Comic Con bash, and the timeline left no room for shipping. Telling printed them on his Bambu Lab H2C and assembled them with help from his son, then flew to San Diego with the batch in checked luggage.

How He Pulled It Off

Telling loaded fifty machines on his Prusa print farm with Polymaker brown filament and ran the bucket bodies. After that finished, he swapped to gray filament for the top and bottom bands. The STL files came straight from the Kickstarter production team, so fit was never a concern.

Support removal was the biggest bottleneck. SliceWorks plates on the farm made support removal easier, but the organic support structures still required careful razor work. Assembly was the final push: his son glued the bands onto each bucket while Telling packed them for the flight.

The Payoff

Day's reaction says it all. When she opened the box at Comic Con, she genuinely did not expect the project to come together in time. The buckets went to the first 200 party guests, and the Kickstarter went on to break records.

The whole episode is a reminder that 3D printing's real strength is not perfect first layers or lab-quality specs. It is the ability to make something custom, fast, and in exact quantities when a real deadline hits.