3D Printing Marvel

I have a new hobby now, which I consider is a hobby, and that is 3D printing. I am only starting though and it has been very interesting so far. Initially I justified (we always do this, don’t judge me, haha) that 3D printing will help me in not buying certain things like plastics stuff from Temu, spare parts to repair broken house items and much more. But these justifications are weak; 5 minutes videos on Youtube can completely nullify them. For example if you are trying to avoid buying plastic parts (such as glued on hook) on Amazon or Temu, you will still need to buy the filament (filament is the plastic thread that is used to print stuff 3D-ly). And these 3D printers normally have certain parts that need buying, that you will end up buying even more stuff.

So that’s a hobby, safe to say. It will always consume more than it produces, monetary-wise. If it starts to bring in money, normally that is a business. And it is not fun anymore.

But burning money without purpose is not fun. Sure, printing a 3D dragon is fun at first but then what do you do with it? Right now I am at the stage of printing stuff that is supposedly help organise things around the house. If I were to be honest though, these things can be found if I searched hard enough on online platforms. Albeit it is a bit more satisfying to watch it printed in front of you. Most of the time that is, because these prints normally come with a learning curve and prints will fail sometimes.

So why buy a printer in the first place? Well the novelty caught my eyes initially, but now I think I am in it for the things that I learned. I learned about designs, such as some designs are better than others and a lot of things go into making a design, a good one. And you normally don’t realise a good design is one, until you’ve seen a bad one. Or until you start to design one and you will certainly design a bad one. I also learned that there are many ways to ‘skin a cat’, i.e. the open canvas of a 3D printer really challenges the way we can approach a problem. Some design are so creative, you wonder how’d they come up with them.

Anyways if anyone is interested in starting 3D printing or buying one, then my suggestion is to 1) of course look at your budget and 2) think about what you want from it. If you want a quick toy, then it is certainly not that worth it as prints take hours (sometimes days!) but if what I wrote above interest you, then give this a try.

Thank you for reading.