Think it, print it!

3D printing has seen a wave of adopters over the last two years or so. I was part of that wave.

The wave started when the price of printers came down sufficiently, combined with the quality of prints getting so good, that 3D printing became actually useful for common people.

It started tongue-in-cheek

The idea of 3D printing came up a long time ago. As far as it is known, when David Jones wrote about it in his amazing Daedalus column in New Scientist the 3rd of October 1974. The Daedalus columns were tongue-in-cheek, but always in a borderland between science and crazyness. Often weird, unrealistic or reckless, but never really in conflict with the laws of nature. David Jones is better known for being the first to describe graphene and Buckminsterfullerene, also in his Daedalus columns.

In the 1980s the first 3D print patents were issued, and in 1987 the first physical 3D printer was released. It was the "SLA-1" from Charles "Chuck" Hull and his company 3D Systems. Chuck also invented the STL file format, which is by far the most used format for describing 3D models today. SLA-1 was a stereolithography printer, so it was related to the one David Jones had thought up in 1974. The other of the two major printing technologies, FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling), came from Scott Crump and his company Stratasys. They sold the first of their "3D Modeler" FDM printers in April 1992.

This was all well and exciting, but 3D printing was not affordable for normal human beings. It was like that until 2004-2005 when Dr. Adrian Bowyer of the University of Bath, started the RepRap movement. RepRap was an acronym for "replicating rapid prototyper". It was an open source printer, that had the goal of being able to print a copy of itself. Seen with todays eyes, the printers were crude, but they pretty much launched 3D printing for the masses. Much of the excitement was philosophical. If a machine prints a copy of itself, that prints a copy of itself, and so on; would we call it life? Evolution would be inevitable, would it run out of our hands? Others thought about 3D printers as the tool to rebuild civilization after a collapse, or to keep a moon base supplied with hardware and replacement parts. There were lots of exciting tangents.

Fast forward twenty years. We didnt get any moon bases, civilization didnt collapse and 3D printers didnt take over the World. But 3D printer technology became better and cheaper, baby step by baby step, and here we are today, when 3D printers have become a viable consumer product.

3D printing

There are two major camps in 3D printing. One are those that print scale models and figurines, the other are those that print functional models. Im pretty much in the last camp. Then there is a spectrum of approaches to the models you print. At one end you download them from one of the many great repositories of 3D models. At the other end you design them yourself. Im mostly in the last end. There is also a middle ground where you modify models others made, which is quite common. I think as you get more experienced with 3D printing, you tend to move towards the self-designing end.

3D printing is a unique way to manufacture thingamajigs. First you get an idea, then you design a model in a CAD program, then you run the result through a so-called slicer, then you print it. If it is not okay, go back to step two.

It is a one-man pipeline. You can do all the steps on your own, at home in your hobby room. It is totally fine to make production runs of 1 thingamajig, and to produce for a market of 1 consumer.

CAD programs are like three dimensional drawing programs. You define your models in them, and export them as .stl or .step files. I prefer free CAD programs that work offline. There are not that many to choose from. I have been fond of Solvespace, which was what I used when I started. It is a very simple, but also very powerful CAD program. It has a lot of potential, but unfortunately also very limited resources for development. Over time I have moved towards OpenSCAD. It is sort of a "Model as Code" concept (MaC, if that is even a term). You define your model in the OpenSCAD language of the program. That way it can take a little longer to make your initial model, but it is really easy to make variations of it. The OpenSCAD language is a bit quirky, but also very effective. It is what Im using exclusively now.

Slicers take an .stl or .step file and build instructions for your particular printer. They are exported as a gcode file, or sent directly to your printer (as gcode). You need to give the slicer input about what filament to use, about supports, about seams, about brims, about lots and lots of other things. I use the open source OrcaSlicer, which is probably the one most commonly used these days. If you want to download it, be careful to avoid all of the false download sites (you can just click on the icon in this paragraph).

The printer just takes the gcode and prints your model. For a smaller model the whole design, slice and print cycle takes less than one hour. This is a very fast turnround, and it allows you to quickly try out ideas, and make very advanced designs.

I recommend that, if you havent done so already, take a closer look at 3D printing. It is in some ways like wood working, both a hobby and a practical pursuit. It will likely also affect your view on things. You might start to see all those small annoyances in your daily life, as opportunities for prints. Would some thingamajig help me here? Couldnt this be avoided by a doohickey like this? Count on it to boost your creativity.

The model in the illustrations, is a pistacie bowl that fits into a Teema bowl (15 cm). If it is useful to you, be my guest and print it. Or even better, design your own bowl, and print that.

Print time is between 90 and 120 minutes, depending on your printer, settings and filament.