You won't be using it make your own chair (or at least, you probably shouldn't) and you won't be mass marketing anything 3D printed nor will you compete in the marketplace with anything that can be injection molded or stamped.
But for a quick one-off part if beats whittling out of a piece of wood by quite a distance.
On another note: soldering irons and hammers are also not for everybody, some people will never get the hang of fabrication. But once you are in the group that likes to make stuff 3D printers are just one more option in the tool arsenal.
Genuinely if you are a creative person it’s an excellent tool to extend your abilities.
Haha, brilliant. Could have done with one of those...
Plus I cannot express the collective relief my spouse and I felt when I was able to repair a poorly designed part on the malfunctioning coffee maker in an hour's time. We're solving the real problems here.
Mass marketed are always cheaper and most of the time better. True.
So why creative professionals need it? Because not everything they need its mass marketted. In fact, one of the best uses is joining two mass marketted things together to create a system.
3d printing is fantastic for joining the gaps that exist between what exist in the market and exactly what you need.
Imagine you are an engineer creating a flight simulator hardware machine, or a driving simulator with VR. You probably will buy the chair, but then you will have to adapt it some way to your structure of soldered beams.
You can spend like 600 euros mechanizing and soldering little metal pieces and wait something like a month for those that make it to make it. Or you could print them and spend like 25 euros and have it ready at the end of the day, look at the problems in the design, iterate.
You need to explain to the artisan what you need done. This person has to understand you. This take time and money.
The effort I make explaining what I need to an artisan is completely lost if I change the artisan.
With a 3D printer, you create a design that is a product in itself. It can be repeated ad infinitum. The work I do today improving the design is work I will not have to do tomorrow.
I routinely send designs to people living 2000 miles away. They print it and can play with it the same day.
And even if mass a produced version of these things would be cheaper/better, often you just won't be able to find it.
Plus it's nice to be the hero around the house when I can solve random maintenance problems with a quick search on Thingiverse or a couple of hours of designing and printing. Not sure it has literally paid for itself since I got one, but it has definitely be more useful than I expected and I would say it has been borderline indispensable for my household.
"Everyone" doesn't. If you don't make things, don't buy tools.
Metaphorically, you're comparing buying a radio to buying a piano. If you just want to listen to music, buying a piano is a very inefficient step to your goal.
I love my two printers. They enable me to achieve the kind of computer precision my artwork requires in a way I don't know I'd be able to achieve otherwise, at least not in such a short amount of time.
E.g. a 3D printer can be great for all kinds of creative hobbies.
I make all sorts of things:
I work for twitch (built bits product initially), so I print a few hundred bits to give out at twitch con for my coworkers, it's a fun thing for them (I expense the plastic).
I needed to replace a bunch of boards on my deck and the dimensions of dimensional lumber have changed. So I could either pay $400 + cost of lumber to get boards cut correctly, or I could pay $175 for the lumber and print abs Shims to make the lumber the correct thickness. Shims at market price were around $75. I was able to iterate on a design and print the 80 shims I needed for about $3 worth of ABS plastic.
I also really enjoy solving problems with the printer in a pretty clean way compared to getting out in the shop. I can, in between matches of dota or pubg, iterate a design and hit print. A match or 3 later I've got a part, or a sub part (mating surfaces) done.
They're also amazing for coming up with templates for making parts out of more time consuming materials like well anything. I can cad a design up in seconds to minutes and hit print. That will get me a part that I can see if it fits. Even wood takes as long as the cad step. And you can iterate a ton.
Another good use case is enclosures and mounts for arduino and ESP32 projects. Lots of little lego parts of eletroics that need to be wired together. Getting them into a reasonable form factor usually requires hot glue and tape to make a shitty ball that's hard to work with, or leaving it on a breadboard which isn't a great form factor, or making a printed enclosure which can hit most of your needs. These can take longer, like 10 hours of iteration but that's amazingly faster than most other methods.
My friend makes furniture. I bought him a printer and he prototypes pieces on the printer. Makes full mockups of living room parts to give to potential customers.
My son does dnd, we print figurines all the time, they're fun weekend projects. He made and painted an infinity gauntlet over the summer which looks pretty sweet.
Have I gotten the $2k out of the printer in absolute value and replacement over mass produced products? No. Maybe about $700 worth of savings there. If you add the DND figures maybe $1000.
If you add the cost of learning, hobbies, time with family, and offsetting iteration and time spent with turn key manufactureres working on a prototype, yes, prolly at least $10k of value (that I wouldn't have spent otherwise).
At the end of the day, for not much space, it makes a lot of physical projects feasible mostly relying on just the computer for the design space.
I don't use my 3d printer to 'fix' things around the house that often because it's frequently cheaper to work around it or buy a replacement. The times a high-value item breaks in a way I can fix with a printed part are rare enough it certainly doesn't justify owning one.
That said, if you really like designing mechanical things or working on electronics projects or similar, a 3d printer is a total blast. I'm currently using mine to make molds for real ceramic parts.
Any pointers on your process here? How do you cure/fire your ceramics?
It's a pretty straightforward, the same technique that's used industrially for most common ceramic production. I 3D print mold positives that then get cast in plaster. That plaster is used as part of a 'slipcasting' process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipcasting
> How do you cure/fire your ceramics?
I'm using standard high-fire (cone 10) ceramic slips that I mix from raw powder. They are fired to ~1300 C in a small electric kiln (although it's a particularly well insulated one so it can go all the way to cone 10 without too much trouble).