Workshop
Apr 13, 2026
3D Printing
A mousepad I do not merely tolerate
A 3D-printed mousepad experiment that turned into my favorite desk pad after a month of daily use.
The final version: rigid, low-profile, and exactly the size I wanted.
This started the way a lot of small hardware projects do: with something mildly annoying becoming impossible to ignore.
My old cloth mousepad was breaking down and leaving little crumbs of its backing all over the desk. It was gross, it was getting everywhere, and it had crossed the line from “slightly worn out” to “actively irritating.”
That alone probably would have been enough reason to replace it, except for one other problem: I am annoyingly picky about mousepads.
I have used a lot of them over the years, and most have landed in the same category for me: acceptable enough to keep using, but never actually good. I tolerated them. I did not like them.
That felt like a solvable problem.
I have a 3D printer, some filament, and just enough free time to make this into a much larger project than it needed to be.
Starting point
The goal was simple enough: make a mousepad that felt good under the mouse, stayed flat, did not have a weird squishy edge, and was sized the way I actually wanted instead of whatever the market had decided was normal.
That led to a lot of prototypes.
I tried a range of surface approaches, including different ironing techniques and top-layer patterns, along with different thicknesses and different slopes for the rise at the wrist edge. Some versions were fine. Some were clearly not it. A few were close.
The design that finally clicked was also one of the simplest.
The surface
The big breakthrough was realizing that simply printing the pad upside down against the stock build plate from the Creality K2 Plus would give it an incredibly uniform, clean look and feel.
That came out beautifully.
For anyone not deep in 3D printing nonsense, the short version is that the texture on the printer’s build plate gets translated directly into that first printed surface. So instead of ending up with a flat, slightly weird slab of plastic, the mouse-facing side picks up a very fine, even texture from the plate itself.
That turned out to be exactly what I wanted. It has a very clean, consistent feel, and at least with the mouse I use, performance has been excellent. I had other ideas for surface treatments and had spent some time thinking through more complicated options, but this worked so well that there was no reason to keep getting fancy.
Sometimes the right answer is the one that is already sitting in front of you attached to the printer.
The structure
The final design is intentionally solid and rigid rather than flexible, so it is not fully relying on the desk beneath it to be perfectly flat.
That turned out to matter a lot.
Because it is printed as a fully solid, low-profile piece at 1.6mm thick, or eight solid layers at 0.2mm, it ends up being much sturdier than you might expect from a printed part this large. In my case the desk is close to flat, but there is a small glass-to-wood transition under part of the pad that I could feel through my old cloth mousepad. With this design, that small gap and tiny height difference completely disappear.
The height also ended up feeling right. I have never really liked those thicker mousepads with the rubber backing that seems to bond itself to glass and then eventually decay into little particles. This went in a very different direction. The chamfered edge feels nice and much less obvious where my wrist occasionally interacts with it. That was one of the details I kept adjusting during prototyping, and I am glad I did.
This is the area that took the most iteration. The slope is subtle, but it changes how the edge feels a lot.
Printing it
It prints upside down at about a 30 degree slope, which lets it build cleanly without supports.
It is one of those prints that sounds almost insultingly simple on paper. It is flat, how hard could it be? Anyone who has dealt with first layers and plastics that like to shrink across a wide span already knows the answer to that question.
The good news is the K2 Plus handled it beautifully. All joking aside, this is a wildly simple print: a few solid layers, nothing fancy, and very little drama.
Well, mostly nothing fancy. I did add color changes, because I wanted the edges to look a little more interesting. I mean, something has to match the blinding RGB lights on my mouse and keyboard.
The one real catch is size.
I wanted a fairly large pad, roughly 12 by 10 inches, so it does need a bigger print bed than a lot of machines can offer. This is exactly the kind of project the K2 Plus shines at.
For anyone who wants the practical numbers without scrolling back through my rambling:
- Print time: about 3 hours
- Filament: about 135g for the 4-color version
The material choice
I printed it in PLA.
That was mostly because PLA is fast, cheap, easy to work with, and perfectly reasonable for this kind of part. It also let me get to a working version quickly, which mattered more than getting clever with materials.
The downside is that PLA slides extremely well on glass.
My desk surface is glass, which meant the mousepad itself was a little too eager to move around. To deal with that, I countersunk a few 15mm square pad locations near the corners, offset inward by about 25mm from each edge, and used Gorilla Tape there to anchor it down. Recessing those squares kept the tape from lifting the pad off the desk, so it could still sit flush against the glass.
That solved the problem well. It keeps the edges from lifting, holds the pad where I want it, and does not require turning the bottom into some overengineered anti-slip science project.
I may experiment with other materials later, and TPU is the obvious one to try, mostly because it would probably be less eager to skate around on glass in the first place. The squishy plastic option is interesting for exactly that reason. Unfortunately, on the K2 Plus, printing TPU reliably at this size is where things stop being fun. The heat creep is real, and right now it feels like the kind of project that would require extra swearing and probably some hardware hacking.
For now, this was simple, effective, and most importantly, immovable.
That was the goal.
A month later
We are about a month in now, and this is still my favorite mousepad I have used.
That is the part that surprised me a little.
Usually when I make something like this, there is still some mental asterisk attached to it. It works, it is interesting, it was worth doing, but maybe it is not truly better than a good commercial version.
That is not how this one feels.
I actually like this mousepad. I do not simply tolerate it.
That may not sound like a glowing endorsement, but in mousepad terms, for me, it kind of is.
Files
I am including the printable STL here under a very open license. Use it however you want.
And if you improve it, please let me know. I would genuinely love to see a better version of this mousepad.