Things to Make with a 3D Printer

http://www.hackthings.com/ten-practical-things-to-make-with-a-3d-printer/

by jheitzeb • 13 years ago

57 38 13 years ago

AlexMuir2• 13 years ago

I've been calling overbuzz on 3D printing from the outset, and this story does nothing to dispel that. These mostly aren't practical things - they're just tat. And guess what? You can make tat a lot more cheaply, quickly and creatively than with some complex device, custom raw ingredients and a load of faffing around.

A 3D printed clock? Fuck off. It's just a clock mechanism attached to a disc of 3D printed plastic - you can attach a clock mechanism to anything and make a clock. Can the mechanism be printed? No, can it bollocks.

I think there are amazing industrial uses for these things, but there are very, very few items which are made from a single colour of a single plastic. I can't remember the last time I needed a replacement part for something and it was just a monoblock plastic piece.

Edit: The submission's title has just been changed from "Ten Practical things to make with a 3D printer"

cfinke2• 13 years ago

I can't remember the last time I needed a replacement part for something and it was just a monoblock plastic piece.

As the father of two young boys, I could make a full-time job of printing replacement plastic pieces for broken toys.

AlexMuir2• 13 years ago

...full-time job...

In a way that's my point - it's probably a 5 hour job to print a replacement plastic peg for some toy. 5 hours is $100 for anyone who can afford a 3D printer. Plus the printer's cost. Financially it makes no sense. As a hobby... brilliant and probably hugely rewarding, but the 3D printing lobby would have you believe we'll all have one and nothing will be landfilled any more.

pilgrim6892• 13 years ago

just yesterday I wanted to repair my phone but I needed a prying tool to pry some parts off of the chip. I could've just printed something like http://daydealx-com.s3.amazonaws.com/files/images6/prytool.j...

A week ago, something broke in the toilet (the refill valve I think it's called... a long plastic tube that refills the tank after a flush). I could've just printed a new one.

I also needed a screwdriver recently, and since domestic 3D printers will eventually be able to print metal just as easily as they can print plastics, I will be able to just print one.

And these are just recent examples off the top of my head...

jackpirate• 13 years ago

If you want to shape metal, you need a real cnc machine. "Printed" metal simply cannot have the right internal crystalline structure for a lot of tasks.

blhack• 13 years ago

There actually are 3d printed clock mechanism. Search 3D printed clock mechanism MIT media lab. I saw one there a couple of years ago while visiting a friend there.

jessriedel2• 13 years ago

Your comment has a couple constructive points. Why the vitriol? It doesn't help the discussion, and it's really not appropriate on HN.

simonsarris• 13 years ago

I just don't get it. Not that 3D printing is bad, just that these examples seem mostly silly for being billed as practical. Nearly every post about 3D printers reads like straight up satire.

I'm acquainted with two families that own machine shops, and my father was very into handyman-ism. Another friend's dad works at the dump (or affectionately, "dump mart").

If we wanted something like a bicycle accessory or camera mount we just made one. Out of wood and wire and paracord. We just hammered and sawed stuff together. Welders can't be that uncommon, and they're a few hundred bucks if you can't find a used one.

Fixing things with plastic? That's called a glue gun and they're ten dollars and existed since way back when Saturday Night Live was funny.

To be fair to the article though, we couldn't make our own LEGOs. We could make our own boats and swords and (hairspray-powered) cannons, but not LEGOs.

Is my experience growing up really that uncommon? Or is having a 3D printer just an expensive substitute for having friends that are in to making and fixing stuff?

~~~

I don't mean to knock the technology itself. 3D printers are really cool, but I think titling an article "Ten Practical Things..." and coming up with the list they did just feels very shoehorned.

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

It's partly a fixed cost versus variable cost argument. Once you have access to a 3D printer and learn how to use it, you can make (some) things much better and faster than you could by hand.

Perhaps you get a lot of pleasure out of crafting stuff with your own hands. That's great. Some people may get a similar pleasure from designing stuff onscreen and seeing it take form in their printer.

mokkol• 13 years ago

You can download products and print it without any experience. Quite powerful.

jlarocco3• 13 years ago

I just don't think people buy many items that are 3D printable.

Using myself as an example, there's not a single thing in my Amazon purchase history that would be 3D printable.

Even looking around my office for items which might be 3D printable (coffee mugs, drinking glasses, plates,...), I can't imagine it being more efficient or cost effective to 3D print them than simply ordering them off Amazon or running to the store.

I think 3D printing is a great prototyping tool, and I'm sure it'll really speed up some manufacturing processes, but I have trouble seeing it as a break through with directly for consumers.

cfinke2• 13 years ago

Is my experience growing up really that uncommon? Or is having a 3D printer just an expensive substitute for having friends that are in to making and fixing stuff?

In the same way that C++ is just a verbose substitute for having friends that are in to writing assembly.

fudged71• 13 years ago

Yes, 3D printing allows people to get interested in DIY by letting them make these parts without much effort. Most city slickers have no idea how to get into DIY.

For a long time, 3D printing will be useful as a "close-enough" alternative to more expensive models, parts, and replacements.

ericb• 13 years ago

Aside from all the things you couldn't make with that approach, 3d printing enables something like the classical lazy programmer.

You can take an open source part, and print it (like using an open source project or library instead of reinventing the wheel). Also, you essentially need only 1 tool to make this, and one material. The effort and time is much smaller, so you can make many more things. You can iterate and improve.

For a rough parallel, you're guy who wants to write a new web app in C. Nothing wrong with C, and without it, there would be no web apps, but the guy with the scripting language and framework will probably smoke you in getting it out the door.

ejlowry• 13 years ago

I wish I'd grown up with a machine shop, that sounds fantastic. I really like making stuff, but I'm a horrible handyman. I'm much more comfortable making (or just copying) a model on a computer and then printing it out. I think the interesting part of the technology is that it makes what you take for granted accessible to someone like me.

F_J_H3• 13 years ago

You may be right - there are not many obvious practical uses...yet.

I'm leery of calling "hype" on new technology simply because practical uses are not immediately evident.

I remember reading that most people in the late 1800's couldn't imagine an economy that was based on jobs that were not related to some aspect of farming...

Edit: In the early days of Twitter, most people couldn't think of anything useful coming out of tweeting 140 characters.

Gormo• 13 years ago

> In the early days of Twitter, most people couldn't think of anything useful coming out of tweeting 140 characters.

Pretty bad example. Twitter's been around for quite a while, and I still can't find anything useful to do with it. There's way more immediate benefit from owning a 3D printer, even at this stage, than a Twitter account.

DannoHung• 13 years ago

You didn't think the 3-axis gimbal camera assembly was pretty cool? You need some tight tolerances to be able to correctly mount motors into something like that.

forgottenpaswrd• 13 years ago

"Is my experience growing up really that uncommon? Or is having a 3D printer just an expensive substitute for having friends that are in to making and fixing stuff?"

I probably made more things growing up than you, from my own microcomputer(from components you had to solder), my complete bicycle, lots of toys, my own welder from microwave transformers, my own tools like motorized saws and stuff including mechanizing all the gears and dioramas for the Warhammer(a UK lead figurines game, we also melted lead to copy dragons[the bigger super-expensive ones]).

I also had lots of friends as a kid, but only a minority were into making things.

Now as a grown up, I really, really LOVE my 3D printer.

Why? Because is not just a maker machine like a saw, but it is a hidden mass production machine. I design once, I upload my design to thingiverse and 10.000 people or a million(if there were that much printers) could do it too without effort.

I also don't need to spend hours thinking how to solve a problem, and more hours making it, I have a real job to fill most of my time, and my family for the remainder. I could go to the web and within five minutes put the printer to work while doing more important things like walking the dog or kissing my wife.

PS: BTW, my job is in making things, we use 3Dprinters and routers for prototypes a lot.

IgorPartola• 13 years ago

I am looking forward to being able to print cases for electronics. No, I don't mean phone cases. More like Raspberry Pu cases, but with custom features. It would be very nice to have an RPi, a powered USB hub, a power supply, and a set of disc spots all in one case. That would make a very nice media center box, as opposed to the current mess of wires, or cutting USB sized holes in project boxes from Radio Shack.

Aside from that, 3D printing holds no special interest for me. In fact, if on demand printing was cheap enough, I would probably just do that.

vidoc• 13 years ago

yet another article with a "<number> [best|top]" kind of title :)

Isamu• 13 years ago

Many repairs of the sort mentioned are probably better made with a mold-able epoxy putty such as Sugru (http://sugru.com)

A 3d printer is killer for things like: a small, intricate, complicated prototype that is easier to model with software than to sit down and carve, make out of clay or paper.

In fact I don't know why I didn't think of this when my daughter proposed to me a complicated jewelry piece that clearly would need a lot of moving pieces and would be difficult to prototype in metal. 3d printing services FTW!

kyzyl2• 13 years ago

It's interesting seeing the negative responses every time a 3D printing post comes up. It seems a common sentiment that 3D printers are somehow just an industrial thing, or otherwise only good for hobbyists. I disagree.

I've used several different models of 3D printers, from the cheapest, to home brewed, to industrial grade, and even the fancy UV cured resin ones. Honestly they really are great for a number of purposes:

1. Quickly getting a near-full fidelity part to hold in your hand. Whether you're engineering something or doing something around the house, there is no substitute for having the thing in your hand.

2. Fast "create and forget" replacements. Handle on your workbench broken/missing/shitty? Print one that fits, screw it on and forget about it. No driving to the hardware store, browsing around, paying, "oops the screw holes are too far apart" etc. How many times have you been making something out of wood at home and only gone to the hardware store to get a handle/hinge/pin?

3. Making 3D parts that would be a huge pain, or impossible, to machine by hand or via cnc. Really, anybody who has spent some time machining parts will tell you that there is more to making a decent part than just designing it and hopping on the mill. Do you have the right tooling? How are you going to hold it? Do I have enough material to hold? What speeds and feeds do I need to use? CNC machining adds an entire extra layer of CAD, and then you still have to worry about most of that stuff.

4. Making several different versions of something, because you aren't sure which one will fit best, look nicest or suck the least. It's pretty rare to see people machine (or even wood form) 5 parts that are identical except for the position of some groove. It just takes too much time, and it's boring.

Don't get me wrong, there's still tons of room for improvement for additive processes, and sometimes a mill or a table saw is a great tool for the job, but enough with this "overbuzz" business. No, you will not be printing out CPUs any time soon, but that doesn't make 3D printers all "buzz".

EDIT: Formatting.

jlarocco3• 13 years ago

You start off saying 3D printing isn't "just an industrial thing," but then 3 of the 4 items in your list presume an industrial setting.

And I would claim item number 2 doesn't happen often enough to justify the costs of 3D printing for most people. A new handle is less than $2 at Home Depot and takes 20 minutes to go buy. A 3D printer is a several hundred dollar investment, the printing material is another big cost, and the printing time itself is longer than it'd take to drive to the store.

Nobody can deny 3D printing will be great for prototyping and some kinds of custom manufacturing, but I've yet to see a convincing argument for consumer 3D printing.

kyzyl2• 13 years ago

How do 3/4 of my points presume an industrial setting? (1) Specifically says otherwise, and why would quickly getting something in hand have anything to do with your setting? I suppose (2) varies from person to person, but I've definitely done a heck of a lot of hardware browsing where I ended up with some crappy part from china that was the only thing they had that fit what I wanted. And then it broke, and then I went back and returned it, etc., etc., etc. There is something to be said about designing your hardware to fit your job, not the other way around.

(3) Also doesn't presume anything. Yes, most people do not have CNC machines (although I know several who do), but you might surprised how many people have wood/metal shops in their garages or basements. One of the other comments on this very story has someone talking about how having a buddy with a metal shop and a dump is just as good a FDM machine.

Again, (4) has absolutely nothing to do with setting. How does being able to cheaply whip off multiple variations of a model having anything to do with industry? Aside from the fact that such methods are often used in industry, because it's a smarter way to do things. Most home-hacking happens one part at a time for exactly the reason I mention.

robertskmiles• 13 years ago

I'm almost certain that you cannot 3D print functioning LEGO bricks. Considering they're plastic, those things are manufactured to extremely fine tolerances.

Things to Make with a 3D Printer

Related Stories