I really enjoy my 3D printer but the number of real use cases is fairly low in terms of day-to-day utility. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me excited about the future of the hobby.
The amount of stuff I've printed with it, km's and km's of filament and the little beast still keeps squirting out molten plastic. Last time I looked at the stats, 91 days print time, 6355m of filament.
One of the best tool purchases in the shed ever. Really stoked with it.
What kind of printer do you have and what did it cost?
Similarly, all my shelf brackets are 3d printed now. THe thing that holds up my custom LED light is 3d printed. Some of the art I have around the house is printed...
These days I find designing a part relaxing, similar to the feeling of writing code for a personal project.
Apparently Fusion 360 is also free for hobbyists, I’m guessing that it’s a bit easier to learn than FreeCAD.
(I realize that designing your own parts isn’t practical for most folks but I think HN is a good audience for this.)
I’ve been meaning to learn FreeCAD or one of the others because the parametric modeling seems useful, but Blender has been good enough for my purposes so far - mostly adapters for tool vacuum ports, and other little things around the house and workshop.
But I agree that the real world uses of 3D printers are endless. Although often you need to know how to use CAD.
That’s like saying owning a computer without basic programming knowledge seems pointless.
Obviously 3D printers are useful even if you never create or modify 3D models.
What the OP however refers to is the "rapid prototyping" that 3D printers unlocked for masses. If You learn even some basic modelling (e.g. few primitives in OpenSCAD for programmers), it's trivial to do test fits and whatever gigs You need.
I haven't realized it myself until some months ago I needed a small funnel for a bottle. After some thinking I realized it's much easier/faster to throw together a difference of two cones and two cylinders in OpenSCAD in about 10min and print it in maybe another 20 than spend the time looking around stores to find some close compromise.
Obviously there have been some successful computers where users don't modify their files, like mp3 players, but those are much cheaper and more user friendly than general purpose computers.
I found a nice looking bracket shaped specifically for my Bamix stick blender that someone else had designed, saved me some trial and error and time and filament.
I found someone else's design for a Makita LXT battery fitting that I used as the base to prototype the inverse: I wanted a dummy battery shape that I could mount to the wall in order to hang my vacuum cleaner from it.
I'm glad I can do some basic CAD / am willing to learn, but I've definitely got some use out of it with only a slicer. And then there are the people who only want trinkets anyway.
Those two projects made me realize that 3d printing can be a full time fun hobby for exploring all those things it would be too hard to machine in a garage.
OpenSCAD is fine for what it does and I do use it a lot for very simple stuff. ImplicitCAD is another interesting project in that space that has fillet unions.
FreeCAD would be great if the Interface wouldn't be so janky. I give it a try every now and then, but never really get over the re-learning aspect.
So, I am still stuck with Fusion360 running in a VM on my otherwise FLOSS-only system :-/