Have you used a 3D Printer?

Maybe 9? If you find yourself making a lot of jigs, small thingies to hold one thing to another, or little mechanisms, it's a huge timesaver. Making a nice adjustable mount for a camera goes from being a lot of machining to a few hours design work.

Basically, it's very good for making things for holding awkward pieces in place while you machine them, or for holding a tool in place while you make something. Or like, all the little cable clips and bits of plastic you use to hold other components in place.

FDM 7/10 when working 2/10 when trying to fix and debug firmware and retest etc…

Resin… fucking -1/10 because the entire experience is terrible if you aren’t going to use it often … I’m trying to sell all my resin stuff and try replacing it with a different printer I won’t hate if I use it only once a month.

Full disclosure I own 4 printers, a laser scanner and at any one time only one of which is always working and it’s the god damn miserable resin printer because I don’t use it enough to break it.

I've used one maybe once and it went alright.

One of my close friends, however, uses them to make a living selling cosplay props/armor, and I've even put some of my own money into investing in a pair of giant resin printers. He's knowledgeable enough that the results are a solid 8 or 10 out of 10, but holy shit the amount of fiddling he has to do to squeeze out every last ounce of speed from what's inevitably a slow process without producing misprints is insane.

6/10, for FDM on plastics; mainly PLA and ABS. Bought an Ender3; dumped it after a month. Now have a Raise3D E2 (FDM printer) for prototyping parts and enclosures.

Overall experience is... can be finicky depending on what you're printing, the plastic type (PLA is generally the easiest; PETG will come out stringly; ABS has certain advantages, but can be more finicky), and the printer. I think the overall experience comes down to both use case and equipment.

Online articles and discussions are biased towards people who treat it as a hobby - with this in mind, the finickyness is viewed as a perk; it allows you to build skills working around the various problems, troubleshoot problems with a community, upgrade your printers for fun etc.

Overall, it would be nice to

Treated as a hobby, for me personally, it's 9/10. I spent a few days this week upgrading my Ender 3 with an extension kit to allow for much bigger prints. Great fun. It all reminds me a lot of messing around with PC clone hardware in the early days.

If I were doing it for a living... Well, getting the printer dialed in to reliably produce prints is a bit of a black art - but maybe the higher end ones are better for that?

Come to think of it, a lot of 3D printer owners seem to spend all their time printing new parts for the printer, which is endearingly circular...

I have a cheap $200 monoprice printer. I followed the advice of others and it works reasonably well. I've printed a few large threaded nuts and bolts to get a feel for what's possible, and haven't used it since. It's the CAD side of it that gets me... I just can't stomach getting into bed with AutoDesk ever again.

Maybe it's time for me to try OpenSCAD.

I also have a cheap $200 cnc engraver that I've done even less with, for similar reasons.

9. I have an FDM printer (ender 3), and I’ve made some (somewhat) neat stuff. So far, I’ve printed in PLA and transparent PETG (printing with a high layer height, thin walls, and gyroid infill looks really neat). Overall, I would recommend it if you like making stuff and 3d modeling.

Also, my current CAD software is blender, so if anyone has something similar (or a plugin) that is better suited to making moving mechanical parts, leave a comment.

10. I have a 3d printer for about 5 years. Sometimes I don't do anything with it for months, then I suddenly have some kind of project which eats all my spare time. I just finished a RC car which I created from scratch using Autodesk Inventor. Even learned how to 3d printed molds to create rubber parts. I guess for 3d printing you should also have an interest in cad design. Otherwise it becomes a bit boring.

I just bought one because they are cheap, I dunno what to do with it.

Its not like star trek you can't just ask for a toy car and you get it. There is a lot of setup leveling and tweaking of supports and the first layer of print to get the print looking clean or even printing at all.

Printing takes hours like 6+ for anything remotely complicated. It will probably take you two or three goes printing a thing until you get results you are happy with. Once its printed you then need to clean up the print removing support etc.

What material you print in will also massively change your results / chances of success. You may need to encase the printer to control the environment temperature, wind and toxic fumes depending on the material need to be accounted for.

The stuff on thingyverse all looks cool but it's all cool gimmicks if you want to do something useful you need to know how to 3d model.

TLDR: It's all a bit of a faff but if you are the type of person that likes to build their own computer its a lot of fun, being able to download a car felt awesome. The toy car has surprising detail and despite being made in PLA the easiest plastic to use its again surprisingly strong.

Ease of use 4/10. If you can't 3d model its fairly useless 1/10. If you can 3d model its so much faster and easier to get complicated parts 8/10.

8 fun creating and printing, but early printers had issues, printer objects some times come of platform and you waste materials as well as time printing. Setting of higher heat need to know about as well. I like the new sites to get new objects to print and easier tools to make stuff.

Yes. Got one of those liquid stays in the base printers. Immediately found out the liquid cannot be touched because it’s very carcinogenic. So I could not run it in the house. Tried to make three prints in my garage and they all failed. Haven’t touched it since, that was two years ago.

5/10 I guess. It's a great hobby, and teaches a lot about CAD. But if I want to fix some broken plastic part quickly I still prefer superglue+soda trick cause it's stronger and takes 15 minutes instead of 3 hours of modeling and 6 hours of printing :)

Cant praise Openscad enough. You dont have to learn anything, except maybe to use your brain.

If somebody could integrate Openscad into Blender better it would be just swell. Now the Openscad export produces just huge raw blob of faces, the defining structure is lost.

I have no interest in owning and operating a printer, but e.g. Shapeways is expensive and slow, so I wish there were more service providers near me.

5

it's been frustrating to troubleshoot when I can't it to print without screwing up (using a model that other people have been printing with no problems).

Great post! Which 3D printer would you all recommend? I almost bought this one https://usa.banggood.com/Creality-3D-Ender-3-3D-Printer-220x...

8

It just fun and useful to print stuff. Once you know a few basic tools and can think about what prints best.

5 - when if get blocked or 1st print layer is not good.

Starter is quite cheap.

10 with my prusa mk3s+. Being able to custom print stuff for specific use cases is very handy.

I've used a 3D laser scanner. Want to get a printer soon.

1

very slow, nozzles get plugged now and then too