Benchy — formally 3DBenchy — is a small tugboat model released by Creative Tools in April 2015 as a calibration and benchmarking print for 3D printers, and the most widely printed object in the hobby.
Daniel Norée designed the boat while working at the Swedish company Creative Tools; Paulo Kiefe, then its CEO, named it 3DBenchy and seeded it across model repositories. Its designers called it a "jolly 3D printing torture test." After Creative Tools merged into NTI Group in 2024, NTI released the model into the public domain for its tenth anniversary, ending years of licensing friction over remixes.
Every feature of the 60 mm hull is diagnostic, and it prints without supports. The curved bow overhang exposes weak part cooling. The cabin roof forces the printer to bridge plastic across open air. The round smokestack reveals axis skew and belt-tension problems as out-of-round circles. Shallow text on the stern and the underside shows whether the first layer is squished too close to the bed. A single print surfaces most common faults of an 🏷️#fdm machine or a new 📝Slicer profile at once.
Because owners print one for every new printer, filament, and settings change, collections accumulate into what the community calls armadas or flotillas. The model has spawned a remix culture of its own: micro-Benchies on resin printers, room-scale enlargements, timed speed-Benchy competitions, and failed "cursed" prints posted for diagnosis. It is effectively the "Hello World" of 📝3D Printing.
A Benchy is the first entry in 📝My 3D Prints, dated July 26, 2026 — five years after a first-layer fight on my 📝Ender 3 V2 ended the hobby for me. Printing the torture test was the return.