Al and I have been speaking on the podcast at the moment a few candy 3D printed wide-format digicam construct, and we acquired to musing on why we 3D-print.
For Al, it’s a possibility to experiment with 3D printing itself: tweaking his machines to get one of the best efficiency out of them. Other folks make small, useful objects that they want of their day by day life, like bag clips or spare components for damaged home equipment. Some of us go for the decorative or the aesthetic. The children in my son’s class all appear obsessive about sci-fi props and fidget toys. The preliminary RepRap perfect was to interchange all business fabrication with machines owned by the person, fairly than by corporations – it was going to be Marxist revolutionary.
But there’s one other group of 3D printer lovers that I feel doesn’t get sufficient protection, and I’m going to name them the hobbyist industrial designers. These are the individuals who design a customized dog-poop-bag holder that precisely matches their extra-wide canine leash, not as a result of they couldn’t discover one which match within the pet retailer, however as a result of it’s merely enjoyable to design and fabricate issues. (OK, that’s actually me.)
It’s enjoyable to be taught CAD instruments, to find out about how issues are designed, how they work, and find out how to manufacture them no less than in amount one. Dreaming, designing, fabricating, failing, and repeating till you get it proper is a good pleasure. And then you definately get to make use of the poop-bag holder day by day for a number of years, till you determine to refine the design and incorporate the teachings realized on the robust streets of sensible use.
Of course none of that is unique to 3D printing. There have been all the time individuals who designed-and-built issues within the steel machine store, or made their creations out of wooden. In that sense, the 3D printer is simply one other software, and the actual enjoyable isn’t in utilizing the 3D printer, however fairly within the technique of bringing issues out of your thoughts and into the world. So possibly there’s nothing new right here, however the latitude that 3D printing affords the pastime designer is superb, and that makes it all of the extra enjoyable, and difficult.
So do you 3D print for necessity, to stay it to the person, to pimp your printer, for the mini-figs, or just for the enjoyment of the method of creating issues? It’s all good. 3D printing is a giant tent.