Ask HN: Have you used a 3D Printer?
If so, how would describe your personal experiences on a scale of 1 to 10?
Cheers, =)
Cheers, =)
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
My girlfriend and I bought a Prusa i3 mk3s+ together, and despite going with the kit version to save money it was really easy to get good quality prints right away. One of the big things that I think helps with this is that Prusa has an auto bed leveling feature, so our printer checks the height of a bunch of points on the bed in a 9x9 grid before each print. It can then build a mesh of the print bed and use that mesh to adjust how it prints to compensate for a bed that's not perfectly level or even not perfectly flat.
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.
HeeksCAM or FreedCad also have direct CAM gcode support.
For 2D engravers, check out MightyScape plugins for inkscape, and bCNC/GRBL.
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.
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.
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.
However, I recently discovered FreeCAD and I have been converted. The paradigm of making a sketch, defining constraints and letting an optimizer figure out specifics is so much more easy and powerful than having to write all the functions myself.
Committing to getting over the learning curve was one thing, and just getting a decent quality mouse instead of using my laptop touchpad was also a big enabling factor.
I get really frustrated with how buggy and confusing FreeCAD is sometimes, but still, it seems infinitely easier to create "professional looking" parts. Fillets, chamfers, etc, are a lot easier. As I recall, Minkowski sum in theory might be quite useful in OpenSCAD, but in practice it was unreasonably slow. And last I'm aware, OpenSCAD was single threaded so I don't feel like I could benefit that much from upgraded hardware.
FreeCAD also can tell me stuff like the volume of my part as well as dimensions I didn't explicitly define. I don't recall OpenSCAD allowing introspection on your objects, which is kind of an obviously useful thing. Plus, FreeCAD does some finite element analysis, which may or may not be reliably informative in my hands, but in principle can give me some advice on the properties of a part before I print it.
It appears FreeCAD can integrate with OpenSCAD to some extent, but I haven't tried that.
Most of the problems with complex objects have magically disappeared.
Their GUI is not good/stable (yet), but the Jupyter notebook integration is great and absolutely killer.
I feel like every time I spend any time with FreeCAD I get stuck within minutes by some kind of "Error 1337 has occurred" style non-explanatory dialog, and then when I search for long enough I find a discussion thread explaining that it's an error from the (parametric) kernel, that there's therefore nothing to be done to improve the message, and you're just somehow supposed to intuit that certain orders of operation are impossible. I've given up.
Solvespace seems a lot more approachable and while it's less powerful, the power all seems to be reachable rather than booby trapped.
For quick stuff I'm using TinkerCAD, which is a doddle.
I will have to give FreeCAD yet another go, I suppose. Maybe there's a threshold where the bugginess starts to be easier to work around...?
Edit: I should add that I only use Linux; if I were willing to change platform, the commercial options seem to be a lot better than the open source ones.
One of the most powerful things about it is it lets you make two drawings at right angles and combine them to make a non-planar curve, as well as having a bunch of tools for manipulating results.
It may require watching some tutorial videos, but this seems to be how you reverse engineer complex curved shapes like, say, cars or other objects.
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).
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.
Prototype cufflinks that I then had printed in metal.
Currently designing a treadmill with 3d parts
Off the top of my head.
very slow, nozzles get plugged now and then too
These things have a pretty steep learning curve to get good results.
This is very particular problem if you have high-heat extruder and you want to use low-heat PLA plastic. Even if you adjust the printing temperature right, all the other functions are for high-heat, and so the PLA sticks and clogs when you are feeding it in.