3D Printing Why?

Angus from Maker’s Muse has a crack at the #3DPrintingOnYoutube thing here, and he nails quite a few important things about 3D printing. It’s no longer quite so important to have the degrees in mechanical engineering, programming, and a skillset in about five different manufacturing techniques if you want a printer. You don’t have to make your own any more.

BTW he does not have a clown nose – Angus, pick your thumbnails a bit better mate. But he does have a lot of great points. If I’d the money for a Mini, I’d trade poor old Brucely Ender3 Pro after a few heartwrenching moments. Ideally, I’d keep them both of course. But watching Angus’ little Mini ripping along like that just makes me relise that that’s where the future is.

But he leaves what I think is the most important thing to last – if you have a printer, you need the models to print with it, and although there have to be hundreds of thousands of those out there now on various model sharing sites, what are the odds that you’ll find the exact thing you need has been designed by someone else already?

I know – always leave your call to action to the very end – but I don’t know how else to say this – you need to know how to make your own. Otherwise it’s just like having an old school inkjet or laser printer and only ever printing other people’s texts and images on it. You need a copy of Photoshop or something and a word processor like LibreOffice if you want the printer to become useful for you personally.

When I started I was quite a few years behind the hobby FDM printer world. Everyone else had made the mistakes and advances, I thought I was King Shit with Brucely printing things for us here. But it all came at a price.

I had to assemble the Ender3 Pro from a semi-assembled boxful of parts, I had to assemble them right, any misalignment would mean a load of trouble later. Hell – even though I took the whole hour to assemble it and align everything, there were still troubles galore anyway.

I ended up disassembling things, replacing stock parts with better quality parts, modifying other parts, repairing a few to the point where – surprisingly – being handy with wire, epoxy glue, and superglue repaired the tiniest fiddly part that broke and stopped the whole printer working.

Before even that I had to enter into a huge month-long email discussion with Creality Support to replace some parts that were defective. (And I have to say that Creality sent me half a printer in spare parts to repair that and I gather I was very lucky indeed to get that service – but I can be persuasive if need be…)

The Point Ted, Get To The Point!

The point was that I printed one of the models that came on the memory card in the box, then I downloaded a few models and printed those, and then – what? I wanted a few useful things! And so I had to get over my panic about 3D modelling and I found the simplest solution of all – Tinkercad. My needs were for simple things – I designed and printed partitioned boxes for the bathroom cabinet to hold all the loose bits, holders to mount power boards without using their flimsy methods, I designed and printer wallmount holders for all the small hand tools Kerry and I use regularly, lids for tomato paste tins and tubs in the kitchen, a few tools – and heaps of decorative things for Kerry to work with.

Maybe if I get better with video I might make a #3DPrintingOnYoutube video too. But I think I said it all here – learn some 3D design package, and suddenly you have the closest thing to a Star Trek replicator available today.

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