Has anyone here bought or built a 3d printer?

If so, did your life get better as the result of owning one? When I get one, we will watch the sunsets together and see movies together and share meals and hold hands(after I print some for it)

Pay no attention to second link in my sig about building a 3d printer...

Watch out!

I printed skynet on a 3d printer and it became self aware, it now rules the house and threatens to print guns to shoot me with...

Nah. On a more serious note I don't consider the technology useful enough yet to warrant buying one. Once they and the consumables they use are cheaper (much cheaper for example than just going out and say buying a cup than 3d printing one) my opinion might change.

Watch this space!

I'd say start small. Get a 3dDoodler. Sure there's more thought, time and effort involved when it comes to making your 3d creations. In the short run though, i'm more of a sprint than a long distant runner, you'll spend less and it'll be easier to port your 3d lover wherever you'd like (so long as there's a plug).

I do a fair bit of playing around with robotics, and one of the biggest pains is producing all the bulk parts. If you want an analogy to building a living thing, you buy things like "muscles" (servos, motors, whatever), which are very general purpose, but need to make the "bones" and connective tissue, which usually aren't general.

Before the era of 3D printing, this meant either wood parts, or laser cut metal parts. Wood is easy to work with if you don't have a means of efficiently cutting metal, which usually means contracting out to a machine shop for final-produce grade stuff. In the era of 3D printing though, it's totally trivial. So yes, I own a 3D printer, and use it frequently for hobby projects that involve producing early versions of projects. Additionally, the printed stuff is super light, which is pretty important considering how fragile it is, but also means you can use lower grade servos than you'd be able to use with metal parts. Usually my procedure roughly goes as follows:

1- Design.

2- Print a prototype with the 3D printer.

3- Get it working with cheap electronics.

4- Replace components with metal once I've got everything how I want it, and drop in beefier motors to offset the increased weight.

The 3D printer makes it super easy to iterate when something looked a lot better on paper than in person. What would take weeks and loads of effort to do with metal/wood at home takes a few hours of printer work on the printer.

I've worked around 3D printers in the past ... the whole "3D" thing is over hyped .

How they work - the tip of the "printer head" heats up, melting a small amount of plastic. The melted plastic drop is extruded at a specific place in . In other words, it works just like a hot glue gun.

Here is the problems with the whole concept of "3D printing"

1: Very slow

2: The printer can not handle any kind of complex 3D shapes. What you see in most unusual "3D printed" items is several bits that have been glued together after they were printed.

3: The finished product is rubbish. It's very rough and needs to be sanded down in a polisher

Code Fox: The whole problem with computer based printing (as in on paper) is that dot-matrix printers are slow. They have limited character sets, and they tend to result in very poor quality prints...

Except we all know that dot matrix printers aren't the only way to print documents, and other methods result in far higher quality.

Personally I'm a fan of print-mills. They combine 3D printing layout with traditional 3D milling (cutting heads) and allow you to use a very coarse extruder to lay down your plastic material in rough approximations of the model, and then refine the detail with the milling machine. They can get insanely fast when done with multiple independent heads and things can get even more fun when they're not z-plane bound, which is really cool as one print head can race up ahead of the others to build tall thin structures if doing so won't block work being done by heads still on a lower level.

Also don't forget things like SLS or Photo polymer based printers are a thing. They're not all low resolution extruded deposition printing. That just happens to be the easiest, cheapest, and therefore most common method.

Code fox, I don't really agree with any of your points. Why? try carving that sculpture you showed, in less time than it took to print no less.

3D printing is great for *functional* parts. If you don't care about form then you can use them as is, yes you may need to turn some parts in to assemblies but that requires only a few skills compared to machining.

For aesthetic parts, you have to spend time sanding, polishing and painting. This is no different to a machined part.

Code fox, I don't really agree with any of your points. Why? try carving that sculpture you showed, in less time than it took to print no less.

3D printing is great for *functional* parts. If you don't care about form then you can use them as is, yes you may need to turn some parts in to assemblies but that requires only a few skills compared to machining.

For aesthetic parts, you have to spend time sanding, polishing and painting. This is no different to a machined part.

I can vacu-form that sculpture in 20 seconds ...

Code fox, I don't really agree with any of your points. Why? try carving that sculpture you showed, in less time than it took to print no less.

3D printing is great for *functional* parts. If you don't care about form then you can use them as is, yes you may need to turn some parts in to assemblies but that requires only a few skills compared to machining.

For aesthetic parts, you have to spend time sanding, polishing and painting. This is no different to a machined part.

I can vacu-form that sculpture in 20 seconds ...

Alright, post up a youtube video of you creating One of those, from scratch, in 20 seconds using vac-forming...

Vacu-form still requires skills and cleanup. I'm also skeptical that the voids below the sculptures chin and belly will turn out well.

edit: you also need a positive of the sculpture in the first place...