Can I use a 3D printer to become more productive, or is it ruining our productivity? This is a confusing tail of a casual user. It is also a classical technology acceptance tale.
Prologue
As the costs of owning a decent 3D printer is ridiculously low, I bought an Ender 3 printer about a year ago with a spool of PLA material. Recently I was asked if I think buying it was a great idea. I honestly do not think so, but not for the reasons I could anticipate.
Anticipation
I have a long love-hate relationship with technology. Probably I do not qualify for an early adaptor, yet I love to see the newest trends and to check how the tech can transform our lives. From the inception of stratasys (the company which I never worked with but always admired) for a period of more than a decade, I have been waiting for 3D printers to become truly personal. I had a 3D printer at work, but I felt bad using it for personal goals.
A year ago, one of my coworkers, our hardware department manager, bought a 3D printer. He told me all the cool projects he does at home, and that his printer is always working. The price was right, so I decided to buy one.
Initiation
Like most 3D printers, my printer needed to be assembled from simpler building blocks. I am not very handy, so it took me about 90 min to construct the printer and another 30 min to calibrate it. That should be a 10 min job for healthy teenagers, but I was too excited to get my teenagers to assemble the device and install the software.
The next day, I browsed Thingverse and a couple of other sites for ideas and downloaded STL files. My printer started to work and worked for a week non-stop creating various amusing stuff.
Garbage in garbage out
The cheap 3D printers have several disadvantages. They print in one color, and the construction quality of the result is similar to a cheap Chinese toy at best. Printing takes a couple of hours. The PLA constructs are mechanically challenged, and I prefer not to work with other (smellier) materials at home.
So there was no point printing the stuff that could be needed in the household. Instead, I was printing toys. For a week my kids were excited about the toys, but after that, they discarded the toys and my wife asked me not to pollute the house with garbage.
A 3D printer as a living machine
As I did not really have any ideas for not-garbage printable stuff, I started to print various upgrades for the printer itself. Some upgrades failed, others worked great. The printer grew with various fan guards and useful storage compartments. I finished a couple of rolls of filling, so I bought a new filling. The printer was ejecting something new every day and was getting bigger and better every week.
What did you do for me lately?
As the only sane person in my family, my wife stopped this.
“Your printer is making noise and eating electricity, but it does not produce anything for the families. Please shut it up and at least reduce the noise pollution. Stop spending time on thingverse, spend time with me.”
I turned off the printer, and it was powered off for 4 months. During that time, my boys occasionally would use their 3D pen to draw strange ideas.
Rejuvenation
Recently I found out that I miss certain stuff at home. My guitar needs battery holders. My daughter needs certain designer doll items, like a guitar for her doll. Probably I will soon get additional requests from my boys. I was asked to bring the printer back to life.
I cleaned the nozzle and the hotbed, formatted the SD drive and calibrated the printer. It is working again, happily making noise near my working table. I do not trust it yet with complex stuff, but I am pretty happy with the simple stuff it makes. My wife already started to get concerned about the garbage my daughter calls “toys”, but it is better than buying dolls.
Why is it a bad idea
Having the printer to make on-demand stuff instead of waiting for post services is a blessing. However, consider this: high-quality industrial printers worldwide can do a better job with more destructive materials, and their services are not very expensive.
Most of the stuff we print is standard stuff. Except for certain packages for certain rare combinations of equipment which need to be printed and tested. But even then, after the testing, it is probably best to buy a high-quality print from a reputable seller.
Printing ideas
Here are some cool printing ideas that I actually use
As for toys, we prefer flexible creatures like this unicorn.
Flexing creative muscles
To be honest, every time I tried to generate something creative, I found a better product on Ebay or similar sites. I dare you to build something nobody else mass-produced.
PLA material tends to break along the print slices, it tends to become fragile when contacting with water. Printing complex shapes requires you to think about support.
Still garbage
What we print at home is garbage by definition. At best, we want to check some ideas, then discard them and move to even better ideas. Having a hard-working printer making noise for hours generating garbage feels wrong.
What do you think?
