The 3D-Printed Future is Now [A Dragon For My Daughter]
3D printers were experimental tech toys in the 2000s, then high-end industrial implements in the 2010s. Today they are accessible tools that produce toys and useful things on-demand!
Just prior to the turn of the millennium, on a tour of UCF1, I saw my first 3D-printed thing, a translucent rook2 with an internal staircase. My father was quite impressed, as he claimed that it couldn’t have been made with traditional machining tools. I didn’t yet have the context to understand why that was, but it was certainly true.
Now, a quarter-century later, my 8-year-old daughter came home from school and told me that her friends’ have flexible a 3D-printed dragons. After a short search, I found the dragon file, sent it to my networked printer, and a few hours later she had the dragon in her hands.3
The technology is truly mind-blowing. Sure, I’m on my third 3D printer at this point, but I still should have jumped on the bandwagon much earlier!
3D-printing is just for toys! (they said)
Circle back to several years into college, and I designed (i.e. followed instructions to generate) a small truck in 3D-modeling program SolidWorks, which the T.A. then turned into what looked like a carved bar of soap (via what I assume was a very expensive machine at the time) that promptly fell apart. During my education/work experience I also learned to work with machine tools, making many things–including a rook and a knight–out of steel using a lathe and milling machine.4
These experiences, plus the machine tool culture that I worked in, made 3D-printing appear to be technology for making toys, not something to produce the durable implements that I would design over my next decade in manufacturing automation. Perhaps there was some truth to that opinion at the time, definitely for more affordable (i.e. cheaper) printers, but at some point the tech started to become viable for useful projects.
My first printer(s)
At my last job where I wasn’t the president of the company5, the R&D department had a very nice 3D-printer… which I (and the other manufacturing engineers) largely ignored. I honestly didn’t understand the technology or its actual capabilities. However, when I finally started sending a few prints to the draftsman in charge of it to test a few ideas, I was shocked at how well things came out.
I could even tap threads into the resulting things, which was neat (though not as good as embedding nuts, a technique I would learn much later). Taking advantage of this tech would have sped up experiments by many months in some cases.
A few years later (then working for myself) I finally bought a printer, a Monoprice Select Mini. It was $222.98, with a rather small build area and nowhere near the features that are available today. Even so, this opened up a new world of creation for me.
I then added a Raspberry Pi-based control hardware/software setup called OctoPrint, which allows me to make or download models off the Internet, send them to my printer over my home network, then pop out to my garage to collect my “thing” a few hours later. It is truly amazing.
It also means that, after upgrading printers (twice), my daughter’s request for a dragon could be fulfilled with a “few clicks” on my computer. While a dragon is certainly a toy, 3D printers are extremely useful when you need some sort of spacer or other custom “thing.”
3D-printing isn’t magic (the simple explanation)
Most consumer-level 3D printers are FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) devices, and while they seem amazing, it’s actually a very simple process repeated many thousands of times with very good precision.
Consider what would happen if you were to draw a circle on a piece of paper with a hot glue gun. Then draw another circle on top of that circle. Then another, and another, etc, etc. You have an extruded cylinder. Make each circle a little smaller and you get a cone; draw a square and eventually you get an open cube.
Add precise control of said glue gun (i.e. filament extruder for actual 3D printers) via stepper motors, along with software to intelligently slice up your model into layers, and it’s not too hard to see how, little-by-little, you can produce something amazing.
20 years ago the technology seemed like something that “works in a lab,” not in the “real world.” But after years and years of incremental improvement, you can get a very good printer for a few hundred dollars. Or–for much more $$–you can get a metal 3D-printer that makes even more amazing things.
We see this pattern repeated over and over in engineering, where something works under ideal conditions, but then evolves into something reliable and amazing. The Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903 was only 120 feet at a sandy “lab” in North Carolina. After a century-plus of incremental development, people can criss-cross the world at many hundreds of miles per hour. Who knows where 3D-printing will be in 2125?
Understand the new, embrace if appropriate
3D-printing is an amazing technology, and something I should have embraced sooner. However, I was still in the “subtractive machining” paradigm as it’s what I knew. Embracing 3D-printing earlier could have helped me not only build cool things at home, but to be more productive at work, where the machine shop took a long time to get things done.6
The question then is what technologies are you passing up today that could help you in your life? AI is the big one that people are talking about today–which I have mixed feeling about–but perhaps there are other emerging areas that could help you if you just knew about them/gave them a chance.
3D-printing IS for toys! and art!
As an engineer, I tend to see the practical side of things (as evidenced my Printables profile). What can this DO? At the same time, there’s nothing wrong with making something entertaining and/or artistic. And if you can make your kid happy with a downloaded file and a bit of filament, that is really awesome!
If you can make lots of kids happy by publishing your model and letting their parents print them, then that is really great. While my designs have hopefully helped many people with their relatively small problems, let’s not forget those designs that make the world just a little bit more beautiful,and bring people joy!
Also, step back every once in a while and consider how far tech has come in the last few decades. Living in the future, it’s sometimes hard to see just how far we’ve come.7
Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes.
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Addendum/Footnotes:
Which seems like a good engineering school, especially with its proximity to the Space Coast, but wow, is it hot there.
OK, that’s a bit of simplification. IIRC, I tried to reduce the size so she could have it that night, and printed it out with marble filament that didn’t work out (at that size) and that was out after that spool. I then printed it full-sized, printed another one after my son dropped it, and repaired one of the final print’s joints with hot glue. BUT it could have been that simple if I had everything set up correctly!
No, I haven’t completed the whole set, as you are probably wondering and as I’ve been asked before.
…And the only employee at Jeremy Cook Consulting LLC.
Over a year in at least one case. My last employer insisted on using their own machine shop for everything. I guess it made sense on some level (to someone at least), and they did good work, but this also made my job very hard at times.
If YOU want a 3D-printer, I would recommend something by 1) Bambu - probably the best out there but possibly some privacy concerns 2) Prusa - also very good, maybe not as good/$$, but they are more “off-grid” so to speak 3) Ender - I have an Ender 3 V2 Neo, which is fairly large and has been a workhorse for me after some setup. Probably the lest expensive of the three listed here in $$ terms, but it may cost more of your time. The other two on this list I have not used personally. You’ll want to do your own research.
There are also supposedly some very good Prusa clones out there, but this is really just the tip of the iceberg discussion-wise.