We bought ourselves a 3d printer for Christmas. Well rather, we bought a 3d printer kit which Ian then had to put together and make work. There are different types of 3d printers, the ones that are used by the company that I’m using for Modme’s costs many hundreds of thousands of euros and works by fusing nylon powder. The one we’ve got is at the other end of the scale and is like an automated glue gun. It extrudes melted plastic into very thin filament which it then builds up in lots of tiny layers into shapes. Yes, that is hairspray in the background, we need to spray the printing plate with hairspray to make the plastic stick.
We bought it from a Spanish company and I must admit Ian paled slightly when he saw the box of bits, but luckily the instructions were very detailed. It really is like Mecano for grown ups. The printer we got was part of a community project where a group of people designed the printer and it is open source so people can amend and adapt the basic printer. It’s quite good because there is a lot of support for this printer, although I think the average age of owners is probably 14, and geeky ones at that. Ian got the printer together, calibrated it and it’s working!
We got it because we wanted to be able to prototype modmes here and there is no need to get the nylon ones made if it is just for prototyping, so we thought that having our own would save time, and pay for itself. We also thought it might be fun to print some things ourselves.
We didn’t get much of a chance to play with it over Christmas, although I was able to test a new modme design and was delighted that it worked. I’m now getting a little more adventurous and it is currently printing a phone case for my phone. I have a modme idea here too – but one step at a time! Ian is going to learn 3d modeling too, so he can join in the fun!