So I bought a 3D printer
After consulting a few friends and colleagues that are experienced with 3D printing, I decided to go with the Monoprice Maker Select v2. It is once of the less-expensive full featured machines out there and probably has one of the lower learning curves. So far I have not had any issues with it other than during set up, I found the included print instructions to be confusing and ended up watching tutorials on YouTube to set the printer up without breaking anything. It was out of stock when I initially went to purchase and so I had to wait about a month to be able to order. But it was worth the wait.
The big issue that I have run into in printing is that some things you need to do to make it work are kind of still just trial and error. I wasn’t able to get anything other than the test print to run successfully without adding tape and adhesive to the print bed. Yes this is a thing people on Twitter will reply to your complaints with so you can figure it out but ultimately in my opinion if that is part of the process it should just be in the instructions, “Step N. add a layer of masking tape and glue stick to the print bed so that it sticks”. Some people will simply not have the right social network of people who are already printing to be able to get that information without a lot of unnecessary hassle if it’s not in the actual instructions.
One of several failed cat prints… catblob
Successful 3d printed cat
Similarly a lot of the downloadable print files that I’ve found require a lot of changes to be at all usable. They look cool but have no supports. And while there are automated tools that can add that in supports without a lot of manual work, again this is something the end user is left to figure out for themselves and not really an obvious instruction that is given somewhere. I wasted part of a day running prints of a little astronaut dude that kept failing for this exact reason, and I knew that was why it wasn’t working I just didn’t really get how to actually add in working supports until I clicked around in Cura enough. Probably would have been a preventable error with better instructions.
As for software, so far I have been using Blender (rarely) and Cura (mostly). I am downloading Rhino so that I can play around with a plugin called Grasshopper that I have seen kicking around on Instagram (!). I do want to get more to the design part of this skill now that I’m getting the hang of printing.
