My First Foray into 3D Printing

3D printing had been something that had fascinated me for months. Towards the end of last year, I decided to take the plunge and try my hand at 3D printing over the Christmas holiday. It wasn’t that intimidating a move for me because firstly, I always relish the opportunity of learning something new. Secondly, I have a little formal education in Mechanical Engineering so manufacturing is a topic I have rudimentary knowledge of.

Having spent a little time with the 3D printer and churned out a few useful(in my biased opinion) parts, I’m going to be writing about what the experience has been like for me. I will start with the process of choosing what my first printer would be, then how I went about learning 3D printing, and also show off some of the not-so-useless parts I’ve printed so far.

Choosing my first 3D printer. #

There is no shortage of choice when looking to buy a 3D printer. From a few hundred pounds to models selling at over a thousand pounds, you can find something for your budget if you look hard enough. There were a few tradeoffs I was willing to make when I was looking for a good first printer:

1. Pay more for ease of use, but keep costs down by not spending on features I didn’t even understand what they did.
2. Get something that just worked.
3. I don’t mind buying a machine with a closed ecosystem if it will deliver superior print quality when compared to its more open counterparts.

The folks of the 3D printing world are one to tweak and fiddle endlessly. While those are vanities I am guilty of myself, I didn’t want to carry it over to my 3D printing exploration. At least not when starting. I understood that I would be working with the little time I could make out from other works, so would prefer to spend my time printing than taking the printer apart constantly. The tradeoff is that I would have to pay more for one of the models that guaranteed such out-of-the-box performance.

I eventually went with a Bambu Lab P1S. The Bambu Lab printers come with the option of an AMS¹ which adds about 230 pounds to the purchase price. I skipped that add-on. I didn’t consider it required for a beginner. From the reviews, the Bambu Lab printers are less hands-on when compared to their Prusa² counterparts. Also, where Prusa embraces an open ecosystem approach, Bambu Lab takes a closed ecosystem position. With the goal I set out with when shopping for a printer, I believe the choice of Bambu Lab satisfied my requirement perfectly.

Learning 3D modelling #

What’s the fun in having a 3D printer if you’re not going to be finding solutions to niche little problems by designing the parts to spec? Learning 3D modelling requires choosing a 3D modelling software. Here also, the choices are many. I wanted something that was both popular and with a free tier that could allow me to learn and get my hands dirty. Another requirement was how easy or accessible were the learning resources of the software. The choice I made here was to use Onshape. It has a usable enough free tier, and they have put a good amount of effort into providing the tutorials for free. Which meant I was able to access top-quality 3D modelling resources for free all on the same platform. Another feather in their hat is that Onshape is entirely web browser-based. I’m always switching machines and that is enough to win me over.

I put in a few days of watching video tutorials and practising exercises which required modelling parts before I felt I was ready to venture out on my own.

First projects #

Pegboard tool holders #

My first project was one of necessity. I have several hand tools I was keeping in my closet and had to move them to the work desk whenever I needed them, and back to the closet when I was done with them. I wanted to have them handy. I want to be able to wheel my chair to my work desk and just reach out for a tool. I might not be able to have all my tools accessible, but I wanted the frequently used ones to be.

I started by buying a Skadis pegboard from Ikea, with a connector that will allow me to clamp it to my desk. Ikea sells tool holders for the pegboard, but they are mostly awkward for the variety of tools I wanted to hang on them. So, 3D printing to the rescue. With nothing but my imagination to go with, I present the result:

Pretty neat, eh? The green parts were all 3D printed to specification to hold each tool.

Multi-device stand #

I hate leaving things lying around. I prefer to have everything in its place, and with two mobile phones and an iPad, I wanted a stand that could hold a flexible amount of devices. My requirements here were:

1. Be able to hold multiple devices. Along different rows or even side by side in the same row.
2. Have support to angle the phone so I could use it when answering video and voice calls.

Nothing on the market was going to satisfy this, so I designed something to meet these requirements:

This has 3 rows, each for a single device, and can even hold 2 small devices in the same row. The ends have sloped out edges for holding the phones tilting backwards.

Using community-created design files #

The 3D printing community is big on open source. There is a staggering amount of models out there that people have shared for free. I wanted to have a cover for my webcam that I could lift and shut for some added sense of privacy, and I found this on Printables³. I didn’t even have to design this myself. Just download and print. The open-source spirit is well and truly embraced by the people of the 3D printing world.

Next steps #

For my next projects, I will be taking on some workspace improvements. I will try to write about these projects as I make them.

The process has been a very fun and rewarding one for me. Like most things, what you get from it is determined by how much effort you put into it, and the initial time of learning how to make my models made it a very creative process when I got to solving my problems. I see the 3D printer as a gateway for solving my problems my way.

If you have seen anything that interests you here, I created a GitHub repository for storing all my 3D models. You should find the parts there.