Good list! Couple thoughts - if you are using some of these items with kids (the replacement part example) it's worth considering the types and materials of the filament you are using. Some are safer than others, depending on the application. If you are using for food storage, there are ways to take otherwise unsafe materials and make them safer for storing edible/consumable materials.
If there is something out there you need, I'd recommend searching Thingiverse, Prusa, and Thangs.com as they all have large libraries of free 3D printable objects.
Disclaimer: I'm the CTO at Thangs.com and also a bit of a 3D printing nerd ;-)
It‘a most often used as an auto-complete - of sorts.
For example, upload an engine piston and it will find other pistons, then all the engines that the piston will also fit within. Handy for designers and mechanical engineers.
But, in the 3D printer use case it is most often used to find similar objects (it does both). For example, upload and a Squid Games mask to print for Halloween and find other Squid Games masks. It’s entirely geometric in that use case, and math doesn’t care if you have different languages or people add the right tags and categories.
Hopefully that makes more sense.
In general, that feature is used less than 1% of the time vs text search. We have a powerful text search engine which we’ve built and customized on top of a lucene implementation. We are generally improving CTR by a percent or two every week.
Appreciate the kind words - if you ever have any feedback, please just send me an email (d@physna.com) and I'll be happy to either jump on a call or take the feedback async by email. We are genuinely trying to build a different type of platform, and we highly prioritize listening to our users. We can't build everything everyone wants immediately, but it's a rare product change we make that isn't aligned to user feedback.
We recently took out my old Crossbows and Catapults set, so my kids can play with it. Unfortunately, only one of the crossbows is still functional, as the plunger on all the others broke. I'd love to be able to 3D print new plungers so that we can use them again. When I checked on ebay, these games were going for hundreds of dollars (though spare parts can probably be scrounged up for much less).
I got a 3D printer earlier this year for no other reason that it was on sale. I cannot even begin to describe how much fun I've been having with it. Funny enough, I've had to print some of the things on the list. I have a pile of ~10 keyboard legs right next to me on the shelf, they often take a hit when I'm angry at something.
I got one second hand from someone I worked with who was moving away. I also didn't realise how much fun it would be. There's great satisfaction from tuning the device to print perfectly and it forces your CAD skills to improve. And of course, being able to print little gizmos to fix things around the house is great too.
Years ago I owned and worked with tons of different FDM printers. They were always needing a height calibration or nozzle unclogging or something else. Does yours seem to work reliably? Honestly I got to the point where I just thought FDM would never be a reliable tech but I would love it if I was wrong.
If yours is reliable, can you tell me what brand it is?
Mine is resin based(elegoo mars pro). The parts are nowhere nearly as strong as pla for instance and the build size is significantly smaller but the amount of detail you can get is astonishing plus there is no time penalty for complex parts, unlike filament based ones. The bonus with elegoo's readings is that they have practically no smell to them whatsoever. I do plan on getting a filament based printer at some point though for larger parts. Namely Creality 3DPrintMill. Got a ton of ideas around robots, plans and drones so we'll see how that goes.
Prusa Mini. My 5yo prints on it pretty much daily (stuff I have pre-sliced and loaded on the memory stick). I haven't had to do any maintenance other than changing spools in about 3 months.
Like all 3d printers they're still fiddly, finicky things in general. There's been a few times where I've needed to spend an hour fettling. But I've owned 3 printers before this and I would say the reliability improvement is at least an order of magnitude in terms of mtbf (where f = fiddling).
I have 3 minis now, 1 with 0.25 nozzle loaded with flex, 1 0.25 nozzle (petg/pla) for decorative/hires and 1 0.4 nozzle (petg/pla) for fast, functional prints. This has mostly eliminated the setup time and calibration required for different "job types".
I couldn't have done this before because just keeping 1 "less reliable" printer working exceeded the free time I was willing to spend on printer maintenance.
My year-old Prusa Mk3S needs very little calibration or maintenance. It is more expensive than most hobby-range machines, but a friend recommended it if I wanted to spend time printing things, rather than upgrading or tuning the printer itself.
Still new - I got the bed leveled once, now I just slice, insert SD card, and print. I've printed 20+ items across as many days without needing to re-level the bed.
No problems with print quality, it just works.
Setup was ok for an absolute beginner, after watching a few YouTube tutorials.
My bed slingers (Ender 3 style) have been fairly reliable. Keys there are making the PTFE reliably locked to the inside of the nozzle*1, stronger springs well pre-loaded, careful bed tramming, spring steel print sheets, and doing a long retraction at the end of a print (and corresponding longer prime line and skirt around the print).
My monoprice clone of the flash forge creator pro runs for many months like a laser printer. I can send a print job to it from upstairs and pick up the print when it’s done. That holy grail came from using a glass print bed, ABS slurry, enclosure, and a dial indicator to really nail the bed tramming.
I’ve since added auto-bed-leveling probes on the bed slingers and they reduce the fiddling significantly. I may add it on the monoprice just for consistency/convenience but it doesn’t seem to need it as much.
Just get a Prusa, they're so good and reliable and the quality is amazing. You can either buy it in pieces (takes about 8 hours to assemble) or pay a bit more and buy it already assembled. I've had a couple of Ender 3's and they start out great but end up deteriorating in print quality after a while so you have to keep tweaking stuff which can be an exercise in frustration. Just my experience.
Precise it is. But the hard part with any manufacturing method is tolerance or expanding/shrinking material. When you 3d print 10.85mm long bar it might actually end up as 10.88 depending on material and denseness of the print. Printing compatible Lego parts is possible, but requires some trial and error to get things right.
You can print infinite Legos. It'll just take a high quality printer (e.g. a Prusa MK3s) and a bunch of test prints to get the tolerances right.
Now that I've got my settings for Legos dialed in I add Lego nubs to all sorts of things so you can attach regular Legos to them.
For example, I've printed a great many magnetic pins for my son's robotics team to give away as swag at competitions. They all had Lego nubs around the perimeter so the kids could attach Minifigures and other Lego parts to the pins.
For the first one I'd recommend doing it without the printer using thick wire and a plastic dip. It will be significantly stronger and (as a result) have much fewer design constraints.
3D printer + minor woodworking + paint/sealant knowledge just kills when it comes to diy. Though I would recommend usinh a 3D printing service, maintaining a prnter can be pot luck with respect to time consumption, and services offer way more choice.
I would hope that only people who really need such a machine would get one, rather than just another tech toy that will end up being a net contribution to waste, plastic waste, and e-waste.
> If you mean me, I run a shop with various machines that produce things as a business.
> Irrespective of who you mean, you should perhaps keep your sanctimony closer to your chest, it grates here.
I meant anyone. There's no need to attack. The ancestor comment wanted to 3d print a bottle drying stick, someone replied and said just make it out of wire, and I endorsed that idea, and clarified by saying that a machine is a waste when your needs are simple. Identifying use cases where specialized machines are not appropriate is worthy of discussion. I really meant bending wire hangers and pointed out that it would be bad to get a machine when literally bending wire hangers would work.
I started writing the comment with "I highly doubt it", but as I was writing, I think it is a very interesting question. And it might be possible.
Like you said, spark plugs require high-heat and high electrical insulation properties. Hence why spark plugs are made out of ceramics (or glass) and metal.
Spark plugs also have a heat rating, which indicates how well the plug is able to extract heat from the tip. If the heat extracting properties of the plug aren't just right, a modern turbocharged engine will not run properly.
Lastly, with the power output of modern coil-on-plug designs, the electric arcs will eat away the electrode quite quickly. That is why spark plugs have a coating on the electrodes to increase longevity.
3D-printing of ceramics is possible, though I do not know how the properties of ceramic polymer filaments hold up. The metal parts will require high resolution (the threads, the spark gap).
So yeah, it might be possible to 3D-print a spark plug, but it will require expensive machines (metal printing, ceramics printing) and the resulting plug will be orders of magnitude more expensive as a traditionally created spark plug. It will also not last as long.
I think 3D printing the spark plug itself would be the wrong approach. You could get a better result by designing and printing a jig for making spark plugs - perhaps a couple of pieces? So like, one extruder for making ceramic tubes, then a lathe for working the ceramic while it's still soft?
My own messing around with a 3d printer has generally confirmed it's an amazing tool for making jigs of all kinds, but the actual prints aren't usually that useful in and of themselves.
I reached a similar conclusion a while back, when a previous partner was talking about the benefits of mensural cups and how annoyingly expensive they were, and how making them cheaper could help young girls in certain 3rd world countries finish their education without being embarrassed out of the classroom the moment they reach puberty. (My ex said there were other issues besides cost, but cost had to be solved as well).
While it is possible to 3D print silicone, and while that would still be cheaper than anything I see on the first page of Amazon search results even today, it was clearly much more sensible to 3D print a reusable mould to pour silicone into.
Then you can expand the idea into a cottage industry by having multiple moulds, with fluid channels, as a single unit.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested a 3D printed multi-mould the size of a shipping container would supply all global demand for mensural cups, but then I found Alibaba and it listed mensural cups for less per hundred than the local store listed them per unit[0], and I figured the purchase price already had nothing to do with manufacturing costs and wasn’t something I could optimise.
[0] at the time, they’re only 20-30 times cheaper today
Thanks for sharing this educational info about spark plugs.
Can you think of other common (even if usually unseen) objects that are especially bad matches for what 3D printing can practically create? Optical lenses and ball bearings also come to mind, but somehow they are less interesting than spark plugs.
FYI a 3D printer is super affordable nowadays. Heres a quick guide for home usage:
FDM printers: They use a spool of plastic as filament which is heated and layed down layer by layer in a small string, are the cheapest, safest, have a large print volume. On the downside they often break down (e.g. the filament gets jammed) and have a coarse resolution (the smallest details are around 0.1mm). Most popular ones are the Ender series from Creality and Prusa printes. Prices are from $150, filament is from $17/kg.
SLA printers: They use a liquid (called resin) the hardens (cures) under UV light, they print a whole layer at once. They are capable of printing super fine details, are less prone to breakdown (they just have 1 motor vs 4 or more in FDM). On the downside the resin they use is a very toxic material, you need to vent its air outside and always use protective gear. Also the print needs to be washed and cured after printing and they have a smaller build volume (iPad mini/iPad screen size) than FDM. You can get one from $250. Check out r/PrintedMinis on Reddit to see what they are capable of.
I suggest getting a FDM printer as the first one unless you really need the fine details, e.g. for printing miniature figures.
DLP resin printers are making it down to consumer pricing, and the LCD based printers are now getting 8k screens - after priming and painting, you'll have a hard time distinguishing from a miniature printed with these from one cast.
This seriously cannot be understated enough. When I was in my final year of high school (2012) my shop teacher was the first person in the entire school board to get a 3D printer, one of the cheapest machines on the market (I can't remember the brand, or the name, only the number at the bottom of the invoice - $11,374.38). He got the machine in February and tasked me to help him set it up. After months of dicking around with it, levelling the bed, using different slicers, trying all kinds of different models, nothing would print properly past the first ~5 layers. Dealing with tech support gave us files that printed absolutely beautifully, but no help getting our stuff to print.[0] After this experience I threw 3D printing to the back of my mind and didn't think about it again until last year...
When I bought an Ender 3 V2 around November. $250 at my door, an hour to put it together, another hour of tuning everything in, and I can count on one hand the number of non-user-error-related failed prints. With software packages like Octoprint and hardware mods like the BLTouch, I will argue that my 3D printer is significantly more reliable than any inkjet or laser print I've encountered.
[0]: That shop teacher retired the same year I graduated, so the printer got moved to the media/broadcasting room. As far as I've heard, that printer was put into permanent storage around 2015 because nobody else could get it working properly.
One of the founding stories of the Free Software Foundation is of a time when just a standard laser printer was a similarly exotic and expensive item:
> But before this happened, I had an experience that prepared me, helped me
see what to do, helped prepare me to see what to do when this happened,
because at certain point, Xerox gave the Artificial Intelligence Lab,
where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsome gift,
because it was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser printer.
It was very fast, printed a page a second, very fine in many respects, but
it was unreliable, because it was really a high-speed office copier that
had been modified into a printer. And, you know, copiers jam, but there's
somebody there to fix them. The printer jammed and nobody saw. So it
stayed jammed for a long time.
> Well, we had an idea for how to deal with this problem. Change it so that
whenever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can tell
our timesharing machine, and tell the users who are waiting for
printouts, or something like that, you know, tell them, go fix the
printer. Because if they only knew it was jammed, of course, if you're
waiting for a printout and you know that the printer is jammed, you
don't want to sit and wait forever, you're going to go fix it.
> But at that point, we were completely stymied, because the software
that ran that printer was not free software. It had come with the
printer, and it was just a binary. We couldn't have the source code;
Xerox wouldn't let us have the source code. So, despite our skill as
programmers -- after all, we had written our own timesharing system
-- we were completely helpless to add this feature to the printer
software.
Interesting to think how cheap and almost disposable printers became and how that might apply to 3D printers.
I too bought an Ender 3 V2, it was about £280 I got it the second it launched in the UK.
Print quality is greatz and once you learn its limitations you can upgrade.
First upgrade is to replace the bed springs with stronger "yellow springs", look them up on Amazon. They're stronger than the stock ones and you'll need to level the bed less often.
Learn to level manually, give it a year even then buy a BL Touch, you'll still need to level manually occasionally.
At this point I have upgraded mine to the point it's barely an Ender 3v2. Replaced the extruder/hotend with an E3D Hemera (direct drive) which prints flexibles like a champ, got a Pi official touch screen for OctoDash and a Pi 4B 4GB running OctoPrint (Pi 4B is overkill but I have a bunch of them at home).
If you do go for a direct drive the X becomes slow and heavy so next upgrade is a Dual Y-Axis, I went for the dual motor option but it splits the power from the board so torque is appalling, go for the belt type instead.
At this point you'll want to be custom building Marlin firmware because the Creality version which comes as stock is lacking. If you don't want to do it yourself there a bunch of community versions you can use if you can deal with their defaults (if you switch to a Hemera or other hotend/direct drive though, you're pretty much going to be custom building forever. There are nice easy to use build tools for VSCode/VSCodium called "AutoBuild Marlin" which sorts out the hard work, you just follow the instructions to tweaks some numhers and hit build. Firmware if installed by sticking it on the microSD and power cycling the printer with it inserted.
I also removed the bottom cover over the driver board and printed one with a 92mm fan slot and put an always-on Noctua with a buck converter, quieter and cooler.
Final mod I want to make is to cut holes in the metal shroud covering the PSU. The Creality design covers all of the vent holes on it leaving only the tiny, loud fan hole cooling the PSU.
Other upgrades include a magnetic bed for easy print removal, a webcam for remote viewing and time lapse / octo lapse (these are beautiful time lapse you see where the print hotend is out of the way) and perhaps a shroud/cupboard if you want to print ABS etc (not recommended with stock hotend or inside your home).
Wrote all of this on mobile so apologies for lack of citations/links, this should all be very searchable, happy to answer questions.
This is 100% my recommendation for a first time 3D printer. I bought a wanhou i3 about 4 years ago and it was endless frustration. The Ender 2 V2 has been a completely different experience. I have probably 200 hrs of prints through it and just a handful of relatively minor issues.
I did have trouble with Octoprint however. I stopped tinkering pretty quickly but IIRC there is some limitation to how the communication protocol works with the board and it caused me to miss steps here and there and generally resulted in poor prints. If that has been resolved would love to hear about it.
I switched my printers over to Klipper and have been overjoyed with the change.
It’s a different style of firmware where all the gcode interpretation and motion calculations are done on the more powerful raspberry pi* and only the motion control pulse generation is done on the printer’s board.
You get very precise step control as a result and with no start-stop blobbing within a layer.
If you don’t want to go that far, look into max resolution settings in your slicer** to reduce tiny moves which might be overrunning the printer’s ability to process. Note that this is still useful with Klipper as well.
* I’m using zero-w Pi, which is still way more powerful than a printer board.
My dad got one of the original Makerbot printers back ~2009. It was expensive, I'm pretty sure in the thousands. And it sucked. Sometimes you could get it to print right, but most of the time it screwed everything up to the point where it wasn't useful for anything. Every print was a roll of the dice.
Last year I got an Ender 3 on Amazon for a fraction of the price (~$150) we spent on the Makerbot. I assembled it, plugged it in, set it to print the test file of the cat, and it just worked. The print was perfect, printed faster than the old Makerbot did, and had better resolution.
My first printer was a Makerbot Cupcake in 2010. It sucked. I had to replace a lot on it to get it to work, and the best thing it ever did was print the parts for my current printer. I have since given it away.
If it's any consolation, we had the Makerbot Replicator which I'm pretty sure was the slightly "higher end" version and it probably didn't work any better than the Cupcake.
I normally don't like talking crap about things people put effort into, and I'm sure that those early-gen Makerbots were capable of doing good prints given enough tweaking, but boy were they really bad in terms of casual printing. It's not even obvious why that was the case considering that all these Chinese 3D printers aren't that different technologically. My only guess is that those laser-cut frames they had were too flimsy for even the most reasonable print speeds, resulting in jostling that would cause catastrophic failure with anything with more than a few inches of vertical height.
The weirdest thing I remember about the Makerbot was that, at the time, it came with nothing to hold the spool. What the actual F? My dad and I built one out of PVC and a roller bearing, if I remember correctly. The decision-making put into those printers was rather odd.
The late-model Chinese printers you see today (which are overwhelmingly duplicates of the Ender 3) are the beneficiaries of lots of community development over the last ten years - this has the added benefit of making cheap and easy printers for new users to get into.
From the Cupcake to now:
1) A constant-speed DC Motor as an extruder is not sufficient for 3D printing, you really need to be able to change how much filament you're moving.
2) A small melt-zone in your hot-end is critical to reducing jamming - This is why the E3D design has been so reliable. Looking through some old pictures, I remember how insane the cupcake hotend was (wrap some Nichrome wire around coupler, and some thermal cement around that, and your thermistor attached to that, and wrap the whole thing with some fiberglass insulation and Kapton tape)
3) Proper mechanical components shouldn't really be substituted - M8 threaded rods are not ACME leadscrews.
I remain amazed at what the community (mostly Prusa, honestly) has been able to get out of 8-bit electronics.
I'd love to print storage items with LEGO connectors and technic pin holes. E.g. a battery storage for AA/AAA . You'd be able to stack and expand them in any way you like.
Putting your own printed parts beside LEGO is a great way to see just how high quality LEGO really are :)
The key thing for me in making lego that snapped was accounting for shrinkage in my prints; i just guessed and gollied a factor on a few parts, but those worked where others hadn't.
I love 3d printing, but I really desire to have the ability to print metals. As a simple dij solution not feasible at this point. I really wish to print replacement parts for my old exotic cars. Bearings, wishbones etc
Would 3d printing work there? Isn't there a whole bunch of crystallization hoo-ha around metals and how they are made to make sure they can handle high stresses? e.g. knives being folded many times; rotor blades in jet engines grown from a single piece.
Exactly. 3D printing makes an approximation of the 3D space occupied by a given part, and nothing more. For some parts this is sufficient, for most it is not.
There is a whole history of materials science and production techniques to get to the 'stuff' we have today, 3D printing is rather 1 dimensional in comparison.
This comment goes a bit too far the other way. 3D printing is a manufacturing technique with its own possibilities and drawbacks which you need to be aware of, but it's very possible to make engineering-grade parts with 3d printing - for some things, it's even the state of the art. You can eliminate layer stress lines with annealing, and you can print interior shapes that would be impossible to injection mould. I myself have made polycarbonate fan blades, only a few mm at the thickest point, with a tensile strength tested to over 500 kilograms. Their theoretical strength is much higher still.
Suspension parts may be a bit much, but I've had good success with smaller parts for my race bike. Like brackets for a CO2 regulator that would have been difficult in metal due to angles necessitated by the curve of the fender. http://www.daves-speedshop.com/CO2brackets.php Making my own velocity stacks for the throttle bodies allowed me to add mounts for a sensor and the airbox tray. http://www.daves-speedshop.com/graphics/FT550/sparkPro2.jpg I couldn't make those out of metal without a full CNC mill.
I bought a printer for my kids this year. An Anycubic Mega Zero with a magnetic base.
It stays pretty calibrated but I have struggled with base adhesion once a few prints have been through it. IPA and abrasives have not fixed it...maybe I will get around to some other things...there have been a few random failures, but not many.
We printed a few novelties items that came out OK. The real learning curve is about the options in the slicer, the trade off between printing time and accuracy etc.
At some stage my kids printed some toy guns. Apparently one of those toys looked real to the phone engineer, the only person who had been in my house over lockdown. Later there was a knock on my door whereupon 4 police officers arrested me and began to search my house for 'section 1 prohibited firearms'. Just as officer 1 finished telling me this, the plastic gun was found. Officer 1 proceeded to give me a ticking off about the dangers of realistic models...while officers 2-4 marvelled at the 3d printer, much to the annoyance of officer 1. Officer 2 asked me if I had tried realistic finishing like with rub n buff, and got chatting about Adam Savage. I had to get a steam punk top hat I made with foam to demonstrate rub n buff to the others. This annoyed Officer 1 enough that he decided it was time to go! I am not quite sure whether I find the episode funny or not. It was pretty scary to begin with.
I actually haven't found anything I wanted to print for a while. I make a lot of things but 3d printing is not always the best tool for the job.
I have heard of this and it is on my list of things to try. It seems counterintuitive to me that the glue wouldn't simply become a runny mess. Thank you for confirming it works. Just confirming we are talking about 'Pritt-Stick' when people say glue stick, are we?
I use elmers glue sticks (the purple ones which dry clear), but Pritt should work as well. It's slightly messy, especially since the purple color comes back if you wet the surface. Then again, this helps to make sure you got all of it off. The underside of the print is slightly tacky, but nothing a wet paper towel can't fix.
Borosilicate Glass or PEI with spring steel backing (if your bed has the magnets vs the build surface having magnet material) work great in my first hand experience, both will give a much better surface adhesion than most others.
Another cheaper option is G10 or FR4. I've got copper backed FR4 on my list of things to try. Apparently it has a more even heating due to he copper against the heated bed. I've been using the glass held on with Binder clips until recently when a few binders popped off and tossed the whole lot on the floor of my garage sending shards everywhere.
Pritt-Stick works, but I have yellow painter’s masking tape on plain sheet of aluminum. Bed’s not even particularly flat, but works for me, no mess.
Couple things that comes off my head that caused my “adhesion problems” over past years were incorrect Z=0 height, uneven bed, rigidity issue on moving bed, and worn out nozzle. Worn out nozzle is easy to spot, if your extruded material curls up before dropping down, that nozzle is done.
It had been more often an excessive or uneven force forcing print to depart from bed, than print simply detaching for lack of reasonable adhesion.
Also, a last-resort workaround is to put the model in the air so first 5mm(1/4”) or more is just supports. Support material is more tolerant and top of it is naturally more flat and parallel. Downside is that the bottom of the print looks just bad.
Do have a glass cover, so you can just take it out and wash (and also have no problem with scratching).
Anyway, a heated bed is much more impactful than the bed surface. Glass at 60°C alone is enough for PLA (with glue it adheres too well and stops working again), while you will need both a heated bed and surface covering for ABS.
Also, any PVA based glue works. If you dissolve some white glue and spread it through the glass, it works even better than solid glue, but it's much more work.
This usually has the downside that you have to clean/wash the plate after a few prints, as the glue otherwise accumulates to a height that interferes with printing.
is that a normal experience in all of the US or only certain states? sounds all kinds of fucked up. the random passerby ratting you out. cops showing up over a handgun, which as far as I know are legal to own in all states unless you're a felon. doesn't sound like land of the free at all.
Not at all, as I mentioned above I am in the UK. It is hard to get our police to react to anything...but any mention of firearms gets them excited. Interestingly I thought the phone engineer was more of a dick than the coppers.
I'm also (as well as OP) in the UK, but mildly disappointed to read it on HN. Bit of a pet peeve of mine (as a capital E Engineer I suppose) the absurd things we accept having 'engineers' sent out for, things that are barely even trades.
I had a dishwasher engineer fit a replacement plastic piece where you put the tablet; a quote for an oven engineer to replace the glass door.
That sort of ridiculousness makes me more sympathetic to bonafide tradesmen using the term (or rather having it used about them by customer services) - boiler engineers, ISPs' 'engineer visit' to set up a new line, etc. - despite that probably being what started my peeve initially!
I don't know how widespread it is, I know in Germany for example it's a protected term. In Canada I think if unqualified (i.e. not 'software engineer' or 'boiler engineer', but just 'Engineer') it is too. We have chartered institutions that can bestow 'CEng', but it doesn't affect whether or not you're allowed to be called 'an engineer' or anything.
(This whole comment probably makes it sound like I'm a lot more annoyed by it than I am.. I just mean it's sort of 'heh ok sure' chuckle/eyeroll when they say it. Like if it started to be normal to refer to pharmacists/nurses/phlebotomists as 'dispensing/assisting/blood-taking doctors' I suppose.)
Perhaps we have it backwards. I'm in the UK. If I saw a company that did 'engineering' I would expect to walk in and see someone at a lathe. I work in the West Midlands a lot and this is especially true.
An engineer may drive a train or maintain ships propulsion in the English speaking world.
A Civil Engineering company builds roads and bridges, and may not have any Chartered Engineers on the staff.
I know several people who design electronics for a living, have degrees in the same subject and call themselves 'Electronic Engineer', yet becoming CEng would never cross their mind. Whereas if you wanted to become a structural engineer you would likely have to become chartered.
I have never met a Chartered network engineer, yet what else would a CCNA call themselves?
Never mind the software engineers and Devops engineers...
Perhaps the Chartered Engineers should have found their own term rather than adopt a general one and then get sniffy about other uses? I know the Chartered Institutes have been around a long time but the term 'Engineer' predates them by some years.
Yeah, maybe. But that's what I mean about 'barely even a trade' - takes a lot more know-how to operate a lathe (per your example) than to do a lot of the 'handyman' type jobs that we get told 'an engineer' will be sent out for.
Fwiw I'm not CEng, EE by degree, but work in SE. I'd like the IET & chartership to be more relevant for SE, but all I meant by that was that we have it, but don't (as some other countries do) require it or something like it in order to use the term 'engineer'.
I'm in the UK, should have said. There are almost no authorised civilian uses of handguns in the UK since the Dunblane shooting. I think you can have one for humane despatch of deer (subject to extraordinary proof of need), but that is all.
I just looked up your printer and it looks extremely similar to the one that I have, which is the Creality Ender 3. Both appear to have an identical stock plate, which makes me think your base adhesion problems will almost certainly be addressed by switching to a spring-steel PEI plate. Although I didn't start having problems after only a few prints, the stock plate on the Ender 3 actually worked too well for me which often caused me to need to use a tool to pry and scrape prints off which resulted in damage and reduced adhesion. I switched to the PEI plate and all my problems related to adhesion went away. It's smoother than the stock plate but somehow PLA sticks pretty well to it, yet not so much that I can't easily remove prints with my fingers. No glue stick or hair spray needed so far.
3D printers really aren't good toys in and of themselves. They're fun for a little while and then you realize you don't need that many plastic doodads. But mine's been very useful for certain projects where I need to build custom parts. People sometimes forget that these printers are just tools like anything else. Fortunately they've become so cheap that it's not really that much of an expense to find that out for one's self.
EDIT: Seriously, anyone with adhesion problems should get a PEI plate. I have had nothing but success with mine and I don't know why these printers don't just come with them in the first place.
If you can code, OpenSCAD might be the best place to start. I have 3D modeling experience, but CAD is sort of a different beast and a skill of its own. Most of the free tools that exist are pretty complicated (FreeCAD makes me want to claw my eyes out) and the professional software packages are outrageously expensive. Once I found OpenSCAD, which is basically just modeling by code, I got way more use out of my 3D printer without just relying on other people's models. There's even an extension for VS Code that allows you to use it as an IDE for it with previews.
This isn't to say that you can't take the time to learn more standard CAD software, but for what I'm doing I haven't had the time for that and I imagine you probably don't either. After a few hours of learning OpenSCAD and reading the cheat sheet, a whole world of possibilities was opened to me.
I would love to use OpenSCAD, just seems to have a really steep learning curve that I can't get up. Even though I write code professionally and have no professional CAD experience, Fusion360 just clicked in a way that OpenSCAD didn't for using my 3D printer (Prusa Mini).
I agree about FreeCAD, lacks a lot of polish, but there's a big update coming from it seems basically one maintainer that looks pretty promising. I found it looking for a way to save in a git-sane format (which this branch/fork has). Main problem with Fusion360 (for me) is the lack of Linux support.
I haven't used Fusion360, but I have to say the screenshots of the UI make it look appealing and pretty straight forward (more so than say Solidworks).
My assumption is that it and other standard CAD packages would have a greater learning curve for a programmer who mostly wants to print simple but custom objects. Granted, I have a background in non-CAD 3D, but OpenSCAD was incredibly fast for me to pick up not just because it relies purely on code but that it eliminates a lot of concepts that you are forced to learn otherwise.
In OpenSCAD, there are no units (though STLs seem to come out in millimeters), no object hierarchies, no sketches, no key combos, etc. All you have is code, in a domain-specific language, that describes what is being built. This can be difficult or unappealing, especially for someone who isn't a full-time programmer, but it can also be freeing to just deal with code and not have other things potentially get in the way or cause confusion.
Of course OpenSCAD probably doesn't scale the more complicated a project gets. But for Arduino/RPi boxes, replicating parts, screws and bolts (given a 3rd party module), it's a powerful and handy tool. However, it might be horrible for someone with limited coding skills.
Fusion 360 is pretty easy and fun to learn. I became productive in it within just a couple hours, and used it to print some things for some house projects. Just my $0.02.
I've also a programming background however I got very intimidated by openSCAD though I think that might've just been because I had been using tinkercad for a year an a half beforehand and was just coddled.
OpenSCAD's biggest problem appears to be that it is single-threaded. I learned this from a guy printing parts for my RV. Is there an open CSG package out there somewhere that does operations like Minkowski Sums as convolutions so that they can be expressed as multiplies in frequency space and then brought down to real space for tessellation? Not only could you take that multi-threaded but you could potentially run it on a GPU hundreds of thousands of times faster.
I started out with OpenSCAD but found it limited me eventually with some of its lack of advanced features, probably because it focuses on solid geometry. I recently switched to CadQuery which uses the same CAD kernel as FreeCAD and haven't looked back. It's also Python rather than a domain specific language.
+1 for PEI base, although it doesn't have to be spring steel. I ran a print farm years ago and used PEI sheets on top of the stock beds. You can buy them cheaply on Amazon with adhesive tape, cut them to whatever size you need, and adhere them right to your existing base plate.
Although I fully agree with the second part of this comment as well - these days I only print a few things a year for custom projects and generally find that making items primarily out of wood and metal with a few plastic parts is a lot more satisfying and useful.
For what it's worth, my Prusa doesn't have any issues with adhesion (heated bed, occasional clean, no cabinet). It could be a calibration issue (the Prusa does self levelling which might help?) or a slicer settings issue, not sure. Anyway, it is possible to get repeatable results.
Well he said the words, 'I'm arresting you on suspicion...'. He later 'de-arrested' me. He also told me that details of my arrest would remain in the Police database... which is nice
Could this have been a good cop / bad cop routine? Officer 2 was encouraging you to break the law. It is an offence to manufacture, import or sell a realistic imitation firearm, or to modify an imitation firearm so that it becomes a realistic imitation firearm.
I had a similar experience where my first few prints worked great, and then had bed adhesion trouble. It turned out the filament had absorbed water from the air, and drying out the filament solved it.
You’re telling this as a funny story, but to an outside observer that sounds horrifyingly dystopian. Someone improperly reported you like they were getting side-pay by the Stasi and four armed government agents showed up at your door to accost you over a personal possession within your own home. Absolutely nuts, and ironically why many people consider personal firearm possession essential to freedom.
agree, from an european POV this story sounds crazy and I would be afraid to even invite random people inside my house for fear of repercussions that I'm unaware of.
My advice for people contemplating 3D printing is similar to software dev: if you can buy exactly what you want off the shelf, you should do that. If it has to be custom, consider what parts could come off the shelf or if it all has to be custom.
I’ve printed many usable and useful things around the house and with the kids. It’s been incredibly fun and even educational, but I generally don’t do it for things that you can pretty easily buy.
I finally convinced myself to buy an Ender 3 when I found out my broken stove knobs would cost $400 to replace. I tried Amazon fakes but none worked. Once I got the printer I designed and replaced the knob backs. Printer paid for itself in one job. I use it for all kinds of projects around the house. Vacuum attachment tools, plastic washers and shims, electronic stands, and so much more. They are extremely useful tools. I have no problems with adjustments or build plates, either because I’m lucky, not too picky, or because I mostly leave it alone instead of tinkering all the time.
This is not applicable to all projects, but if there is some thing you want to print and you don’t have a printer, consider if it could be made from wood.
The tools can be more accessible than a 3D printer, can take up less room, and you get a skill that you get satisfaction from.
I’ve owned a 3D printer for 11 years. I found myself cured of the desire to print doodads pretty quickly, because they just become “stuff” lying around your house. While it’s cool to see the printer produce some of these things, I feel a bit like I’m burdening myself with trying to figure out how to deal with this in the future.
I’ve found that the most useful stuff to print is not random items I find online, but things I model on my own. Most recently this was a series of mounts for the electronics for my Halloween display. 3/4 were my work, the last was a repurposed raspi mount. My favorite thing about the work was that I was solving a problem unique to me. It was a one-off, just-in-time solution.
Yep, designing and printing ones own designs is great fun. Unfortunately few folks know how to use CAD. I was lucky enough to learn in high school.
Most of my designs aren’t glamorous, mostly functional items like mounts, standoffs, etc. I did print a ergo keyboard I designed (a la dactyl) but it turns out I suck at ergo design.
Probably haven’t gotten my money’s worth for the printer, but realizing relatively simple designs can be gratifying. Designing for print-ability with minimal supports is a fun challenge.
I've wanted a 3d printer for a while but never had anything that I needed to print.
Until I got a CPAP machine.
The masks are made to fail, from cheap elastics that stretch out after 3 months, to flimsy plastic that is supposed to be under strain and guaranteed to fail. And at $200-$600 to replace the 'shitty bits' a 3d printer will pay for itself very quickly.
Edit: Lots of advice further down in the comments! Thanks everybody!
Like one of the commenters below, I recommend using a service for 3D printing. The reasoning is that for a couple of bucks (for a 4cm x 4cm x 4cm / 2"x2"x2" part), the print quality will be _much_ better than anything you can reasonably make at home. I've been able to print sub-millimeter-thickness gaskets for example. The bigger parts I make look like they're injection-molded (no layer marks, etc). Plus, I get a huge variety of materials (like metals, silicone, ceramics). I personally have used https://craftcloud3d.com/ (finds the cheapest pricing across a multitude of vendors and materials) and https://www.jawstec.com/ (one of the vendors that pops up often on craftcloud for MJF). Not affiliated with them in any way, just a very happy customer.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadIf there is something out there you need, I'd recommend searching Thingiverse, Prusa, and Thangs.com as they all have large libraries of free 3D printable objects.
Disclaimer: I'm the CTO at Thangs.com and also a bit of a 3D printing nerd ;-)
For example, upload an engine piston and it will find other pistons, then all the engines that the piston will also fit within. Handy for designers and mechanical engineers.
But, in the 3D printer use case it is most often used to find similar objects (it does both). For example, upload and a Squid Games mask to print for Halloween and find other Squid Games masks. It’s entirely geometric in that use case, and math doesn’t care if you have different languages or people add the right tags and categories.
Hopefully that makes more sense.
In general, that feature is used less than 1% of the time vs text search. We have a powerful text search engine which we’ve built and customized on top of a lucene implementation. We are generally improving CTR by a percent or two every week.
I've used Thangs before but hadn't really understood the use case for the reverse search. Thanks for the explanation!
Thanks from the bottom of my heart.
We recently took out my old Crossbows and Catapults set, so my kids can play with it. Unfortunately, only one of the crossbows is still functional, as the plunger on all the others broke. I'd love to be able to 3D print new plungers so that we can use them again. When I checked on ebay, these games were going for hundreds of dollars (though spare parts can probably be scrounged up for much less).
If your interested in digging in more within some generally positive and positive communities, I'd recommend r/3dprinting and r/functionalprint.
If yours is reliable, can you tell me what brand it is?
Some people have claimed to have run thousands of hours on their Prusa machines, as they are built for reliability above all.
Like all 3d printers they're still fiddly, finicky things in general. There's been a few times where I've needed to spend an hour fettling. But I've owned 3 printers before this and I would say the reliability improvement is at least an order of magnitude in terms of mtbf (where f = fiddling).
I have 3 minis now, 1 with 0.25 nozzle loaded with flex, 1 0.25 nozzle (petg/pla) for decorative/hires and 1 0.4 nozzle (petg/pla) for fast, functional prints. This has mostly eliminated the setup time and calibration required for different "job types".
I couldn't have done this before because just keeping 1 "less reliable" printer working exceeded the free time I was willing to spend on printer maintenance.
Still new - I got the bed leveled once, now I just slice, insert SD card, and print. I've printed 20+ items across as many days without needing to re-level the bed.
No problems with print quality, it just works.
Setup was ok for an absolute beginner, after watching a few YouTube tutorials.
My monoprice clone of the flash forge creator pro runs for many months like a laser printer. I can send a print job to it from upstairs and pick up the print when it’s done. That holy grail came from using a glass print bed, ABS slurry, enclosure, and a dial indicator to really nail the bed tramming.
I’ve since added auto-bed-leveling probes on the bed slingers and they reduce the fiddling significantly. I may add it on the monoprice just for consistency/convenience but it doesn’t seem to need it as much.
1 - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7tCxO17XZtw
Now that I've got my settings for Legos dialed in I add Lego nubs to all sorts of things so you can attach regular Legos to them.
For example, I've printed a great many magnetic pins for my son's robotics team to give away as swag at competitions. They all had Lego nubs around the perimeter so the kids could attach Minifigures and other Lego parts to the pins.
3D printer + minor woodworking + paint/sealant knowledge just kills when it comes to diy. Though I would recommend usinh a 3D printing service, maintaining a prnter can be pot luck with respect to time consumption, and services offer way more choice.
I've had a 'D.I.WirePro' from Pensa Labs on my wishlist for a wee while now... https://www.pensalabs.com/
The ethos I was tuning into with my parent comment was more stuff like this: https://www.amazon.com/Home-Made-Contemporary-Russian-Folk-A...
Irrespective of who you mean, you should perhaps keep your sanctimony closer to your chest, it grates here.
> If you mean me, I run a shop with various machines that produce things as a business.
> Irrespective of who you mean, you should perhaps keep your sanctimony closer to your chest, it grates here.
I meant anyone. There's no need to attack. The ancestor comment wanted to 3d print a bottle drying stick, someone replied and said just make it out of wire, and I endorsed that idea, and clarified by saying that a machine is a waste when your needs are simple. Identifying use cases where specialized machines are not appropriate is worthy of discussion. I really meant bending wire hangers and pointed out that it would be bad to get a machine when literally bending wire hangers would work.
Spark plugs are interesting examples of ubiquitous and essential objects with a particular combination of mechanical and electrical requirements.
Like you said, spark plugs require high-heat and high electrical insulation properties. Hence why spark plugs are made out of ceramics (or glass) and metal.
Spark plugs also have a heat rating, which indicates how well the plug is able to extract heat from the tip. If the heat extracting properties of the plug aren't just right, a modern turbocharged engine will not run properly.
Lastly, with the power output of modern coil-on-plug designs, the electric arcs will eat away the electrode quite quickly. That is why spark plugs have a coating on the electrodes to increase longevity.
3D-printing of ceramics is possible, though I do not know how the properties of ceramic polymer filaments hold up. The metal parts will require high resolution (the threads, the spark gap).
So yeah, it might be possible to 3D-print a spark plug, but it will require expensive machines (metal printing, ceramics printing) and the resulting plug will be orders of magnitude more expensive as a traditionally created spark plug. It will also not last as long.
My own messing around with a 3d printer has generally confirmed it's an amazing tool for making jigs of all kinds, but the actual prints aren't usually that useful in and of themselves.
While it is possible to 3D print silicone, and while that would still be cheaper than anything I see on the first page of Amazon search results even today, it was clearly much more sensible to 3D print a reusable mould to pour silicone into.
Then you can expand the idea into a cottage industry by having multiple moulds, with fluid channels, as a single unit.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested a 3D printed multi-mould the size of a shipping container would supply all global demand for mensural cups, but then I found Alibaba and it listed mensural cups for less per hundred than the local store listed them per unit[0], and I figured the purchase price already had nothing to do with manufacturing costs and wasn’t something I could optimise.
[0] at the time, they’re only 20-30 times cheaper today
Can you think of other common (even if usually unseen) objects that are especially bad matches for what 3D printing can practically create? Optical lenses and ball bearings also come to mind, but somehow they are less interesting than spark plugs.
FDM printers: They use a spool of plastic as filament which is heated and layed down layer by layer in a small string, are the cheapest, safest, have a large print volume. On the downside they often break down (e.g. the filament gets jammed) and have a coarse resolution (the smallest details are around 0.1mm). Most popular ones are the Ender series from Creality and Prusa printes. Prices are from $150, filament is from $17/kg.
SLA printers: They use a liquid (called resin) the hardens (cures) under UV light, they print a whole layer at once. They are capable of printing super fine details, are less prone to breakdown (they just have 1 motor vs 4 or more in FDM). On the downside the resin they use is a very toxic material, you need to vent its air outside and always use protective gear. Also the print needs to be washed and cured after printing and they have a smaller build volume (iPad mini/iPad screen size) than FDM. You can get one from $250. Check out r/PrintedMinis on Reddit to see what they are capable of.
I suggest getting a FDM printer as the first one unless you really need the fine details, e.g. for printing miniature figures.
Woah. That's way better that I would've expected.
This seriously cannot be understated enough. When I was in my final year of high school (2012) my shop teacher was the first person in the entire school board to get a 3D printer, one of the cheapest machines on the market (I can't remember the brand, or the name, only the number at the bottom of the invoice - $11,374.38). He got the machine in February and tasked me to help him set it up. After months of dicking around with it, levelling the bed, using different slicers, trying all kinds of different models, nothing would print properly past the first ~5 layers. Dealing with tech support gave us files that printed absolutely beautifully, but no help getting our stuff to print.[0] After this experience I threw 3D printing to the back of my mind and didn't think about it again until last year...
When I bought an Ender 3 V2 around November. $250 at my door, an hour to put it together, another hour of tuning everything in, and I can count on one hand the number of non-user-error-related failed prints. With software packages like Octoprint and hardware mods like the BLTouch, I will argue that my 3D printer is significantly more reliable than any inkjet or laser print I've encountered.
[0]: That shop teacher retired the same year I graduated, so the printer got moved to the media/broadcasting room. As far as I've heard, that printer was put into permanent storage around 2015 because nobody else could get it working properly.
> But before this happened, I had an experience that prepared me, helped me see what to do, helped prepare me to see what to do when this happened, because at certain point, Xerox gave the Artificial Intelligence Lab, where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsome gift, because it was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser printer. It was very fast, printed a page a second, very fine in many respects, but it was unreliable, because it was really a high-speed office copier that had been modified into a printer. And, you know, copiers jam, but there's somebody there to fix them. The printer jammed and nobody saw. So it stayed jammed for a long time.
> Well, we had an idea for how to deal with this problem. Change it so that whenever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can tell our timesharing machine, and tell the users who are waiting for printouts, or something like that, you know, tell them, go fix the printer. Because if they only knew it was jammed, of course, if you're waiting for a printout and you know that the printer is jammed, you don't want to sit and wait forever, you're going to go fix it.
> But at that point, we were completely stymied, because the software that ran that printer was not free software. It had come with the printer, and it was just a binary. We couldn't have the source code; Xerox wouldn't let us have the source code. So, despite our skill as programmers -- after all, we had written our own timesharing system -- we were completely helpless to add this feature to the printer software.
Interesting to think how cheap and almost disposable printers became and how that might apply to 3D printers.
I too bought an Ender 3 V2, it was about £280 I got it the second it launched in the UK.
Print quality is greatz and once you learn its limitations you can upgrade.
First upgrade is to replace the bed springs with stronger "yellow springs", look them up on Amazon. They're stronger than the stock ones and you'll need to level the bed less often.
Learn to level manually, give it a year even then buy a BL Touch, you'll still need to level manually occasionally.
At this point I have upgraded mine to the point it's barely an Ender 3v2. Replaced the extruder/hotend with an E3D Hemera (direct drive) which prints flexibles like a champ, got a Pi official touch screen for OctoDash and a Pi 4B 4GB running OctoPrint (Pi 4B is overkill but I have a bunch of them at home).
If you do go for a direct drive the X becomes slow and heavy so next upgrade is a Dual Y-Axis, I went for the dual motor option but it splits the power from the board so torque is appalling, go for the belt type instead.
At this point you'll want to be custom building Marlin firmware because the Creality version which comes as stock is lacking. If you don't want to do it yourself there a bunch of community versions you can use if you can deal with their defaults (if you switch to a Hemera or other hotend/direct drive though, you're pretty much going to be custom building forever. There are nice easy to use build tools for VSCode/VSCodium called "AutoBuild Marlin" which sorts out the hard work, you just follow the instructions to tweaks some numhers and hit build. Firmware if installed by sticking it on the microSD and power cycling the printer with it inserted.
I also removed the bottom cover over the driver board and printed one with a 92mm fan slot and put an always-on Noctua with a buck converter, quieter and cooler.
Final mod I want to make is to cut holes in the metal shroud covering the PSU. The Creality design covers all of the vent holes on it leaving only the tiny, loud fan hole cooling the PSU.
Other upgrades include a magnetic bed for easy print removal, a webcam for remote viewing and time lapse / octo lapse (these are beautiful time lapse you see where the print hotend is out of the way) and perhaps a shroud/cupboard if you want to print ABS etc (not recommended with stock hotend or inside your home).
Wrote all of this on mobile so apologies for lack of citations/links, this should all be very searchable, happy to answer questions.
This is 100% my recommendation for a first time 3D printer. I bought a wanhou i3 about 4 years ago and it was endless frustration. The Ender 2 V2 has been a completely different experience. I have probably 200 hrs of prints through it and just a handful of relatively minor issues.
I did have trouble with Octoprint however. I stopped tinkering pretty quickly but IIRC there is some limitation to how the communication protocol works with the board and it caused me to miss steps here and there and generally resulted in poor prints. If that has been resolved would love to hear about it.
It’s a different style of firmware where all the gcode interpretation and motion calculations are done on the more powerful raspberry pi* and only the motion control pulse generation is done on the printer’s board.
You get very precise step control as a result and with no start-stop blobbing within a layer.
If you don’t want to go that far, look into max resolution settings in your slicer** to reduce tiny moves which might be overrunning the printer’s ability to process. Note that this is still useful with Klipper as well.
* I’m using zero-w Pi, which is still way more powerful than a printer board.
** https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvw3DrVAeTA
Last year I got an Ender 3 on Amazon for a fraction of the price (~$150) we spent on the Makerbot. I assembled it, plugged it in, set it to print the test file of the cat, and it just worked. The print was perfect, printed faster than the old Makerbot did, and had better resolution.
I normally don't like talking crap about things people put effort into, and I'm sure that those early-gen Makerbots were capable of doing good prints given enough tweaking, but boy were they really bad in terms of casual printing. It's not even obvious why that was the case considering that all these Chinese 3D printers aren't that different technologically. My only guess is that those laser-cut frames they had were too flimsy for even the most reasonable print speeds, resulting in jostling that would cause catastrophic failure with anything with more than a few inches of vertical height.
The weirdest thing I remember about the Makerbot was that, at the time, it came with nothing to hold the spool. What the actual F? My dad and I built one out of PVC and a roller bearing, if I remember correctly. The decision-making put into those printers was rather odd.
From the Cupcake to now:
1) A constant-speed DC Motor as an extruder is not sufficient for 3D printing, you really need to be able to change how much filament you're moving.
2) A small melt-zone in your hot-end is critical to reducing jamming - This is why the E3D design has been so reliable. Looking through some old pictures, I remember how insane the cupcake hotend was (wrap some Nichrome wire around coupler, and some thermal cement around that, and your thermistor attached to that, and wrap the whole thing with some fiberglass insulation and Kapton tape)
3) Proper mechanical components shouldn't really be substituted - M8 threaded rods are not ACME leadscrews.
I remain amazed at what the community (mostly Prusa, honestly) has been able to get out of 8-bit electronics.
I’ve repaired so many things with it, and engaged in so many new hobbies.
Having a device in your house that can, within reason, magic any item you can dream of into existence is game changing.
Anyway, the 3D printer is coming any day now.
The key thing for me in making lego that snapped was accounting for shrinkage in my prints; i just guessed and gollied a factor on a few parts, but those worked where others hadn't.
There is a whole history of materials science and production techniques to get to the 'stuff' we have today, 3D printing is rather 1 dimensional in comparison.
Happy printing!
I bought a printer for my kids this year. An Anycubic Mega Zero with a magnetic base.
It stays pretty calibrated but I have struggled with base adhesion once a few prints have been through it. IPA and abrasives have not fixed it...maybe I will get around to some other things...there have been a few random failures, but not many.
We printed a few novelties items that came out OK. The real learning curve is about the options in the slicer, the trade off between printing time and accuracy etc.
At some stage my kids printed some toy guns. Apparently one of those toys looked real to the phone engineer, the only person who had been in my house over lockdown. Later there was a knock on my door whereupon 4 police officers arrested me and began to search my house for 'section 1 prohibited firearms'. Just as officer 1 finished telling me this, the plastic gun was found. Officer 1 proceeded to give me a ticking off about the dangers of realistic models...while officers 2-4 marvelled at the 3d printer, much to the annoyance of officer 1. Officer 2 asked me if I had tried realistic finishing like with rub n buff, and got chatting about Adam Savage. I had to get a steam punk top hat I made with foam to demonstrate rub n buff to the others. This annoyed Officer 1 enough that he decided it was time to go! I am not quite sure whether I find the episode funny or not. It was pretty scary to begin with.
I actually haven't found anything I wanted to print for a while. I make a lot of things but 3d printing is not always the best tool for the job.
Another cheaper option is G10 or FR4. I've got copper backed FR4 on my list of things to try. Apparently it has a more even heating due to he copper against the heated bed. I've been using the glass held on with Binder clips until recently when a few binders popped off and tossed the whole lot on the floor of my garage sending shards everywhere.
Couple things that comes off my head that caused my “adhesion problems” over past years were incorrect Z=0 height, uneven bed, rigidity issue on moving bed, and worn out nozzle. Worn out nozzle is easy to spot, if your extruded material curls up before dropping down, that nozzle is done.
It had been more often an excessive or uneven force forcing print to depart from bed, than print simply detaching for lack of reasonable adhesion.
Also, a last-resort workaround is to put the model in the air so first 5mm(1/4”) or more is just supports. Support material is more tolerant and top of it is naturally more flat and parallel. Downside is that the bottom of the print looks just bad.
Anyway, a heated bed is much more impactful than the bed surface. Glass at 60°C alone is enough for PLA (with glue it adheres too well and stops working again), while you will need both a heated bed and surface covering for ABS.
Also, any PVA based glue works. If you dissolve some white glue and spread it through the glass, it works even better than solid glue, but it's much more work.
I had a dishwasher engineer fit a replacement plastic piece where you put the tablet; a quote for an oven engineer to replace the glass door.
That sort of ridiculousness makes me more sympathetic to bonafide tradesmen using the term (or rather having it used about them by customer services) - boiler engineers, ISPs' 'engineer visit' to set up a new line, etc. - despite that probably being what started my peeve initially!
I don't know how widespread it is, I know in Germany for example it's a protected term. In Canada I think if unqualified (i.e. not 'software engineer' or 'boiler engineer', but just 'Engineer') it is too. We have chartered institutions that can bestow 'CEng', but it doesn't affect whether or not you're allowed to be called 'an engineer' or anything.
(This whole comment probably makes it sound like I'm a lot more annoyed by it than I am.. I just mean it's sort of 'heh ok sure' chuckle/eyeroll when they say it. Like if it started to be normal to refer to pharmacists/nurses/phlebotomists as 'dispensing/assisting/blood-taking doctors' I suppose.)
An engineer may drive a train or maintain ships propulsion in the English speaking world.
A Civil Engineering company builds roads and bridges, and may not have any Chartered Engineers on the staff.
I know several people who design electronics for a living, have degrees in the same subject and call themselves 'Electronic Engineer', yet becoming CEng would never cross their mind. Whereas if you wanted to become a structural engineer you would likely have to become chartered.
I have never met a Chartered network engineer, yet what else would a CCNA call themselves?
Never mind the software engineers and Devops engineers...
Perhaps the Chartered Engineers should have found their own term rather than adopt a general one and then get sniffy about other uses? I know the Chartered Institutes have been around a long time but the term 'Engineer' predates them by some years.
Fwiw I'm not CEng, EE by degree, but work in SE. I'd like the IET & chartership to be more relevant for SE, but all I meant by that was that we have it, but don't (as some other countries do) require it or something like it in order to use the term 'engineer'.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre
No. Fight the American default!
3D printers really aren't good toys in and of themselves. They're fun for a little while and then you realize you don't need that many plastic doodads. But mine's been very useful for certain projects where I need to build custom parts. People sometimes forget that these printers are just tools like anything else. Fortunately they've become so cheap that it's not really that much of an expense to find that out for one's self.
EDIT: Seriously, anyone with adhesion problems should get a PEI plate. I have had nothing but success with mine and I don't know why these printers don't just come with them in the first place.
I think I would get more use out of it if I acquired some basic CAD skills!
This isn't to say that you can't take the time to learn more standard CAD software, but for what I'm doing I haven't had the time for that and I imagine you probably don't either. After a few hours of learning OpenSCAD and reading the cheat sheet, a whole world of possibilities was opened to me.
I agree about FreeCAD, lacks a lot of polish, but there's a big update coming from it seems basically one maintainer that looks pretty promising. I found it looking for a way to save in a git-sane format (which this branch/fork has). Main problem with Fusion360 (for me) is the lack of Linux support.
My assumption is that it and other standard CAD packages would have a greater learning curve for a programmer who mostly wants to print simple but custom objects. Granted, I have a background in non-CAD 3D, but OpenSCAD was incredibly fast for me to pick up not just because it relies purely on code but that it eliminates a lot of concepts that you are forced to learn otherwise.
In OpenSCAD, there are no units (though STLs seem to come out in millimeters), no object hierarchies, no sketches, no key combos, etc. All you have is code, in a domain-specific language, that describes what is being built. This can be difficult or unappealing, especially for someone who isn't a full-time programmer, but it can also be freeing to just deal with code and not have other things potentially get in the way or cause confusion.
Of course OpenSCAD probably doesn't scale the more complicated a project gets. But for Arduino/RPi boxes, replicating parts, screws and bolts (given a 3rd party module), it's a powerful and handy tool. However, it might be horrible for someone with limited coding skills.
Although I fully agree with the second part of this comment as well - these days I only print a few things a year for custom projects and generally find that making items primarily out of wood and metal with a few plastic parts is a lot more satisfying and useful.
Try using a heated bed and enclosing the printer in a chamber to prevent draughts (anything will do, cardboard).
A heated bed and IPA work for me.
Making guns at home is as American as apple pie.
edit: apparently this didn't happen in the USA?
I’ve printed many usable and useful things around the house and with the kids. It’s been incredibly fun and even educational, but I generally don’t do it for things that you can pretty easily buy.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-50840434
I'm also curious about SLA 3D printing for casting models, there seems to be types of resin specifically designed for 'burning out' too.
The tools can be more accessible than a 3D printer, can take up less room, and you get a skill that you get satisfaction from.
I’ve found that the most useful stuff to print is not random items I find online, but things I model on my own. Most recently this was a series of mounts for the electronics for my Halloween display. 3/4 were my work, the last was a repurposed raspi mount. My favorite thing about the work was that I was solving a problem unique to me. It was a one-off, just-in-time solution.
Most of my designs aren’t glamorous, mostly functional items like mounts, standoffs, etc. I did print a ergo keyboard I designed (a la dactyl) but it turns out I suck at ergo design.
Probably haven’t gotten my money’s worth for the printer, but realizing relatively simple designs can be gratifying. Designing for print-ability with minimal supports is a fun challenge.
Until I got a CPAP machine.
The masks are made to fail, from cheap elastics that stretch out after 3 months, to flimsy plastic that is supposed to be under strain and guaranteed to fail. And at $200-$600 to replace the 'shitty bits' a 3d printer will pay for itself very quickly.
Edit: Lots of advice further down in the comments! Thanks everybody!