I have been interested in 3D printing for quite a few years but I've put off diving into it due to the time constraints of raising a young family. Then this year I started getting some time back, some money turned up and then there was an offer I couldn't refuse so a few weeks ago a new Bambu Lab A1 showed up on my doorstep!
This wasn't a spur of the moment decision; I'd spent much of this year planning ahead, trying to understand the product, the market and what kind of things I would need to get me started on the journey. I sought out advice and received lots of great feedback from experienced hobbyists. I also had to think about where I was going to put it, what kind of environment would be suitable. It took me over 6 months! Even then I wasn't entirely sure I was buying the right items.
So I bought the A1 combi package with the AMS lite unit (for multi-colour printing), hot ends of different sizes, a double-sided build plate with smooth and textured sides. some glue and 5 rolls of Bambu Lab PLA filament, which is expensive but regarded as high quality and I wanted to maximise my early successes.
My reasons for choosing the A1 are manyfold but a key reason was simply that I liked the look of the A1, it has a sort of elegant white and grey design that avoids the industrial black cube of other models and I hoped this would help with the all important Wife Approval Factor. I was concerned I would be told to immediately get that noisy thing out of the house, so in preparation I'd gone to the effort of building a new bench in the garage out of spare wood, but that environment is less than ideal because of humidity/dust/temperature so I wanted to just "try" it for a while indoors and get used to it.
As it happened my efforts to achieve family approval for this strange new device were very successful, possibly too successful. From the moment it was unboxed, my kids were fascinated by it, they argue over who gets the next print, it's a magic toy factory! My wife indicated some approval over its appearance and was interested in the possibilities. I may have dropped the idea that money could be made from making and selling products with it and her inner Ferengi was unleashed. To this day the printer remains indoors and no one complains.
I am a complete novice to this new hobby, I spent some time trying to plan out how to develop my skills gradually and this is what I have done. Initially I did some test prints, I use PLA which is a easy material to print with to avoid too much disappointment and so far with over 100 hours of print time I have only a handful of failed prints although some are arguably my own fault rather than the material.
I started just printing models from makerworld.com, Bambu's own online model repository. All the prints there are free and they are usually pre-sliced, meaning they are models that come with calculated printing instructions. The app makes printing from there very easy compared with the normal multi-step process for taking a model from CAD to printer. I can just choose a model and click a few buttons and my printer starts printing it. All I have to do is remember to remove the last print from the build plate first, but I'm sure that part of the process will be automated too someday!
Quickly I realised I had made a mistake in my ordering. I didn't order any white or black filament, which is a very commonly used colour. I had to place another order and also bought orange and yellow. Now I want some brown and purple, and all the other colours of the rainbow, and some multi-colour filaments. It seems the minimum number of rolls of filament you need is at least N+1, where N is how many you have now.
I've printed something most days. An early print was some replacement clips for my Lian Li PC case that I originally bought around 2001 and the clips in question broke about 10 years later and since then I've used sellotape to tack it back on. No longer! That case is fixed and good as new. Shortly after I printed some clips to repair part of my kitchen that kept falling off. Our toilet roll holder broke and I printed a replacement unit with a tray for phones and drawer for sanitary wipes. Besides repairs I've printed toys, organisers, parts for my printer, you name it.
I later learned about scaling, I printed a tray for my Atari 2600 games, someone made a model for a cartridge holder but it consumed quarter of a roll of filament and I needed two of them! I realised the design was excessively tall, intended for good grip while placed on its side but that wasn't important to me so I cancelled the first print at about what I needed and it worked fine so I printed the second one at scaling the Z-axis so the full model squashed down to the same size as the first one and it saved me 250g of filament, which is quite a lot of money using the Bambu filaments I have.
Efficient designs appeal to me, particularly with AMS models that switch colours - sometimes more than once - within a layer, each time purging the hot end of its left-over contents and discards the "poop". In one extreme case a low-poly model of a sloth spent 7 hours printing just the head which used 3 colours, a miniscule amount of black and small amount of white, each consumed probably 4x as much in waste poop and I had to keep returning to the printer to empty the discards bin that kept filling up! I am still quite fond of this model though, it's one of my favourite prints.
I took a day off work and spent a couple of hours following a YouTube tutorial about Fusion 360. This is a CAD program and in the first lesson I made a Lego brick from scratch and then printed the result. The feeling of achievement from making a physical object from scratch was nothing short of amazing! I'm looking forward to doing more tutorials and developing this skill a lot more.
This is where I'm at today, I think a lot of my expectations about the hobby became true. I am getting a little obsessed, I may brain dump if someone asks about it. It is an expensive hobby to get into and maintain but it's also very rewarding. My kids enjoy it too, they will take small breaks from playing to sit and watch the printer for a while, the movement is relaxing and I found this too while I'm thinking through a problem for work, I'll turn and watch the printer and more often than not the solution floats into my mind! I've had a great start but I'm still very much a novice and need to spend a lot more time building my experience but so far I imagine I'll still be boring people and filling my house with plastic experiments for the foreseeable future!