[alphagrep12345]

Why does everyone need a 3d printer? Maybe this statement would sound as ludicrous looking back as asking why does everyone need a PC in the 1980s. However, I still don't understand why would a regular person need a 3d printer? Mass marketed goods are always cheaper due to economies of scale. And would you really want to put in the effort to make your own chair, etc?

[jacquesm]

I make a lot of stuff from scratch and a 3D printer is an excellent way to quickly test if something is going to work or not in practice. Also: musical instrument parts, prototype machinery, replacement bits for old gear that you can't buy anymore. It's the sort of thing that you use more and more the longer you have it because you see applications that you never dreamed off before getting it.

You won't be using it make your own chair (or at least, you probably shouldn't) and you won't be mass marketing anything 3D printed nor will you compete in the marketplace with anything that can be injection molded or stamped.

But for a quick one-off part if beats whittling out of a piece of wood by quite a distance.

On another note: soldering irons and hammers are also not for everybody, some people will never get the hang of fabrication. But once you are in the group that likes to make stuff 3D printers are just one more option in the tool arsenal.

[m0xte]

I’m using mine to produce enclosures, replacement parts and new mechanical parts for my other interests. As well as printing things for the kids who have an endless stream of ideas. It turned into an unexpected family activity. Finishing and painting stuff is fun too.

Genuinely if you are a creative person it’s an excellent tool to extend your abilities.

[dwoozle]

I print a lot of stuff around the house with a toddler. I printed guards to prevent him from turning on the oven, a insert for the piano that prevents him from pressing the auto play demo, a shim to get a drawer to close more smoothly, a shampoo caddy that hooks around our shower stall, a storage system for small hardware, a set of clips for the computer cords to keep them organized, a doohickey to strip leaves off of herbs, geez there must be more I’m forgetting.

[tumes]

Ha, I thought I was being novel pointing out how convenient it was for solving the myriad problems that come with parenthood. I printed a bunch of car logos for my vehicle-obsessed kid to stare at, name, and futz with during diaper changing time and it has figuratively paid for itself in terms of mitigating piddling power struggles.

Plus I cannot express the collective relief my spouse and I felt when I was able to repair a poorly designed part on the malfunctioning coffee maker in an hour's time. We're solving the real problems here.

[dwoozle]

I forgot that! Once he started to recognize his name I printed several toys with his name on them. Like, a dinosaur off thingiverse with “Steve” in raised letters on his belly.

[contingencies]

insert for the piano that prevents him from pressing the auto play demo

Haha, brilliant. Could have done with one of those...

[hevi_jos]

Everyone does not need a printer. A creative professional like an architect, engineer, electrician, decorator, wood worker, they absolutely need it.

Mass marketed are always cheaper and most of the time better. True.

So why creative professionals need it? Because not everything they need its mass marketted. In fact, one of the best uses is joining two mass marketted things together to create a system.

3d printing is fantastic for joining the gaps that exist between what exist in the market and exactly what you need.

Imagine you are an engineer creating a flight simulator hardware machine, or a driving simulator with VR. You probably will buy the chair, but then you will have to adapt it some way to your structure of soldered beams.

You can spend like 600 euros mechanizing and soldering little metal pieces and wait something like a month for those that make it to make it. Or you could print them and spend like 25 euros and have it ready at the end of the day, look at the problems in the design, iterate.

[hevi_jos]

PS: Another very important thing is that when you talk with an artisan to make your pieces it is craftsmanship.

You need to explain to the artisan what you need done. This person has to understand you. This take time and money.

The effort I make explaining what I need to an artisan is completely lost if I change the artisan.

With a 3D printer, you create a design that is a product in itself. It can be repeated ad infinitum. The work I do today improving the design is work I will not have to do tomorrow.

I routinely send designs to people living 2000 miles away. They print it and can play with it the same day.

[contingencies]

There is an ancient and effective standard interface for artisans. It's called technical drawing. If you spend the time defining your part in those terms you can scale manufacturing and have redundant suppliers. Further, these days to many fabricators you can send 3D models instead of the drawings. For product design exceeding tiny quantities, such an approach offers benefits over non-scalable self-fabrication with unprofessional tooling that will ultimately limit your access to a broader range of fabrication processes and materials. I've banned 3D printers in our office for that reason. We occasionally 3D print outside, but more often these days just get metal CNC'd.

[Youden]

I don't think everybody _needs_ one but they're extremely handy to have, especially when you want something very particular, like a missing part of a cheap tool, a new handle for a particular broom, a doorstop that works with your weird door, plastic feet that fit your specific furniture or a desk organizer that's the specific size needed for your desk.

And even if mass a produced version of these things would be cheaper/better, often you just won't be able to find it.

[skybrian]

Most people won't need it, but most people don't need woodworking tools either.

[tumes]

This will sound frivolous and ridiculous, but I have a toddler with constantly changing tastes and it's a nice way to be able to engage with and encourage their interests. For example, cars have been a huge deal lately, and being able to 1) print a bunch of logos for room decorations and 2) put the logos in areas that the kiddo finds onerous to encourage them to go there (e.g. How many cars can you name while we get changed for preschool) has been a life saver.

Plus it's nice to be the hero around the house when I can solve random maintenance problems with a quick search on Thingiverse or a couple of hours of designing and printing. Not sure it has literally paid for itself since I got one, but it has definitely be more useful than I expected and I would say it has been borderline indispensable for my household.

[_jal]

> Why does everyone need a 3d printer?

"Everyone" doesn't. If you don't make things, don't buy tools.

Metaphorically, you're comparing buying a radio to buying a piano. If you just want to listen to music, buying a piano is a very inefficient step to your goal.

[eigenstuff]

I'm a sculptor who specializes in math and physics visualizations, I have two Prusa printers and they are invaluable tools for me. I 3D print a lot of sculpture parts and things like sculpture bases that would be difficult and time consuming to make on a milling machine (grids of tapered square holes, etc), in addition to lots and lots of tooling like jigs for setting the back stop on my model railroad chopper to precise lengths.

I love my two printers. They enable me to achieve the kind of computer precision my artwork requires in a way I don't know I'd be able to achieve otherwise, at least not in such a short amount of time.

[detaro]

Not everyone needs a printer - but an easy to use, reliable and relatively affordable printer is more suitable for "everyone", not just people that enjoy "fiddling with my 3D printer" as a side-hobby or can/want to afford expensive ones. I interpret the article as meaning it that way.

E.g. a 3D printer can be great for all kinds of creative hobbies.

[eyeball]

I want to buy one so I can convert a brain MRI I had a while ago into a 3D printed model of my brain.

[dfasdfasd]

There are a ton of online services that allow you to order 3d printed parts from your own designs. The quality will likely be much higher than what you can print at home as well.

[Causality1]

Even as a person with zero 3D modeling skills, I like making a printer because it lets me make little knick-knacks of things that aren't popular enough to warrant actual toys but someone bothered to model and put up on Thingiverse.

[grogenaut]

I bought a 3d printer when I got a hiring bonus for referring a friend. I had played around with one before but a nice turn key one was the real trigger I needed. I bought it without really knowing what all I'd do with it.

I make all sorts of things:

I work for twitch (built bits product initially), so I print a few hundred bits to give out at twitch con for my coworkers, it's a fun thing for them (I expense the plastic).

I needed to replace a bunch of boards on my deck and the dimensions of dimensional lumber have changed. So I could either pay $400 + cost of lumber to get boards cut correctly, or I could pay $175 for the lumber and print abs Shims to make the lumber the correct thickness. Shims at market price were around $75. I was able to iterate on a design and print the 80 shims I needed for about $3 worth of ABS plastic.

I also really enjoy solving problems with the printer in a pretty clean way compared to getting out in the shop. I can, in between matches of dota or pubg, iterate a design and hit print. A match or 3 later I've got a part, or a sub part (mating surfaces) done.

They're also amazing for coming up with templates for making parts out of more time consuming materials like well anything. I can cad a design up in seconds to minutes and hit print. That will get me a part that I can see if it fits. Even wood takes as long as the cad step. And you can iterate a ton.

Another good use case is enclosures and mounts for arduino and ESP32 projects. Lots of little lego parts of eletroics that need to be wired together. Getting them into a reasonable form factor usually requires hot glue and tape to make a shitty ball that's hard to work with, or leaving it on a breadboard which isn't a great form factor, or making a printed enclosure which can hit most of your needs. These can take longer, like 10 hours of iteration but that's amazingly faster than most other methods.

My friend makes furniture. I bought him a printer and he prototypes pieces on the printer. Makes full mockups of living room parts to give to potential customers.

My son does dnd, we print figurines all the time, they're fun weekend projects. He made and painted an infinity gauntlet over the summer which looks pretty sweet.

Have I gotten the $2k out of the printer in absolute value and replacement over mass produced products? No. Maybe about $700 worth of savings there. If you add the DND figures maybe $1000.

If you add the cost of learning, hobbies, time with family, and offsetting iteration and time spent with turn key manufactureres working on a prototype, yes, prolly at least $10k of value (that I wouldn't have spent otherwise).

At the end of the day, for not much space, it makes a lot of physical projects feasible mostly relying on just the computer for the design space.

[thrax]

I use mine for designing and building robot parts. I can design, print, and test like 5 different component designs per day. The difference this makes in quality of construction is insane. Even if I had a full tool tool shop I wouldn't be able to iterate like this. It's truly incredible.

[dfasdfasd]

No everyone needs a 3d printer for sure. A big part of what stopped the idea that 3d printing would be this magical revolution is that designing plastic parts is actually fairly hard.

I don't use my 3d printer to 'fix' things around the house that often because it's frequently cheaper to work around it or buy a replacement. The times a high-value item breaks in a way I can fix with a printed part are rare enough it certainly doesn't justify owning one.

That said, if you really like designing mechanical things or working on electronics projects or similar, a 3d printer is a total blast. I'm currently using mine to make molds for real ceramic parts.

[e12e]

> I'm currently using mine to make molds for real ceramic parts.

Any pointers on your process here? How do you cure/fire your ceramics?

[dfasdfasd]

> Any pointers on your process here?

It's a pretty straightforward, the same technique that's used industrially for most common ceramic production. I 3D print mold positives that then get cast in plaster. That plaster is used as part of a 'slipcasting' process:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipcasting

> How do you cure/fire your ceramics?

I'm using standard high-fire (cone 10) ceramic slips that I mix from raw powder. They are fired to ~1300 C in a small electric kiln (although it's a particularly well insulated one so it can go all the way to cone 10 without too much trouble).