My 3D printing hobby

For a long time I had a couple of things that I really wanted, but which were a bit too expensive to justify - a 3D printer and a VR headset.

With the VR headset I'd been interested in this since I was a child, and my brother and I went to play Legend Quest only to find the Amiga-based tech at the time just wasn't even close to ready for VR. As companies like Oculus brough decent-quality VR to the home, I stuck with Google Cardboard for a while before getting a Windows Mixed Reality headset. It's been fun, but I only use it occasionally.

The 3D printing side has definitely taken up much more of my time. There's little more satisfying than those few occasions when you have an idea, design a piece (using FreeCAD or OpenSCAD so far, currently learning Fusion 360), and print out something that solves a problem. A mounting bracket or USB hub riser may be quite simple to design but it's no less satisfying when it gives you something you needed that you couldn't buy.

Also satisfying is assembling a kit 3D printer. Flat-pack furniture has nothing on some of these. If you get something like an Anet A8 (which I don't recommend, by the way), then you'll spend several hours putting it together, during which time you get to understand how it's all wired together, how the hot end and extruder parts work and how it all moves mechanically. By the time you're printing you know enough to maintain it, replace parts, and have a good starting point to modify the printer and make it better.

Over time I've tried a number of different printers. For the kids I got a Fabrikator II Mini which produced good results for a while but was very hard to work on when it played up and the control boards just didn't seem to be reliable (not to mention changing the connectors with a version revision not helping when getting replacements). They now have a Creality Ender 2 which my 11 year old son uses to print various miniatures. It's been reliable, and pretty tolerant even of having bits slightly poorly adjusted, giving decent results.

For myself, I started with an Anet A8. At around £100, it was a price point where I didn't have to put too much effort into justifying it as a present that I might use. It was a great learning experience, but the results are only OK. It's noisy, it's a potential fire risk (I had a heating element fall out and melt the PEI sheet it rested on, fortunately it didn't set fire to anything, and poor connections on both the board and heated bed heated up and melted), it's a pain to unclog when it jams, and you can't print at all fast without affecting print quality. You can print braces to stiffen the flimsy acrylic frame, you can amend it to a bowden setup to make the head lighter, and you can replace the frankly dangerous control board, but then at that point you would have been better off buying something better to start with.

After that I picked up an FLSUN Delta. Delta printers are interesting, with vertical pulleys on 3 towers and a lot more calculations for the print movements, but they have a light head and can potentially print reasonably quickly. The 2020 extrusion-based frame is reasonably sturdy, the bed levelling works (just about), and while it is tall it can sit on a relatively small desk area. I had some decent results from this. I found it necessary to print a new piece for the extruder to avoid filament escaping, but that was a simple print. It also worked pretty well for PETG and ABS as it's fairly easy to put it in a basic enclosure, although with the motors inside the longevity may be limited - fortunately the control board can be moved so the stepper motors aren't overheating.

Next up, I got a FlashForge Finder. This has a CoreXY type setup where the bed moves up and down not forwards and backwards. No heated bed and a small 140x140 area limits what you can do, but I got some glass tiles, put PEI sheets on them, and designed and printed a frame on the Anet which slotted into the bed bracket and then I had cheap, easily removable plates to swap out. The direct drive is reliable, too. I had problems using the full print area without getting some lifting because of the lack of a heated bed, but it proved a good printer for doing miniatures and smaller pieces of scenery. I used it almost non-stop until I had a few more printers and had to think about which ones to get rid of, it's now been passed on to a colleague.

After that I got a CTC Bizer - my one and only dual extrusion printer. It has a smallish but heated bed, and I've put a removable spring steel plate on it which works. I really want to like this printer more than I do, because I like the idea of dual extrusion - particularly to be able to do dissolvable supports. However, this is the only machine I have that doesn't run a Marlin or Marlin-like firmware and that Sailfish just isn't quite as robust - it's harder to update, I've had issues with the z-axis motor turning off when cancelling prints, and it's harder to set up slicers to generate output for it. The saving grace would be dual extrusion. However, the lesson you quickly learn is that dual extrusion is VERY tricky to get working. You have to perfectly align the vertical height of the 2 nozzles, the bed has to be very well levelled, and you need to perfectly set the X and Y offsets. Things can easily end up moving slightly then you need to do it again. I still have this, but I've only ever had a couple of dual extrusion prints out of it worth looking at, despite several times of trying.

I have a CTC resin printer. It's a rip-off of the Formlabs Form1+. Apparently they initially cloned the firmware and software, which would probably have worked pretty well. However, their cobbled-together replacement barely works. Just don't. Get any Anycubic Photon or an Elegoo Mars if you want a resin printer, at least you'll get output which justifies the mess and smells that come with resin printing. It kind of put me off resin printers, but I'm still closely watching the ones doing volumetric printing or no-peel printing - they're currently very experimental or very expensive but promise being able to use cheaper resins while printing many times faster, at which point I may switch.

Last but not least are my Creality machines. In case there was any doubt, I have 3 of them - the CR-10 Mini, the CR-10 and the CR-10S. Give them a good filament and the right settings and you can print large prints or sets of miniatures going and be confident it's going to work. I got all of these 2nd hand, so they weren't necessarily in perfect condition.

The Mini had an old board that had a capacitor issue that caused temperature variations. It would print pretty well, but since the bootloader was locked and I wanted to fit auto bed levelling I installed a new TH3D board. It's currently my PETG printing machine as I've got settings that produce nice solid parts with basically no stringing - any functional parts go on there. It has a removeable spring steel plate held on with bulldog clips which make it easier to peel off those PETG parts. It also has a dual-gear extruder, which works, but I had to change the e-steps as a straight swap leaves it massively under-extruding.

The CR-10 I've left almost stock. The one change I've made has been a spring steel sheet, again clipped on. I've run through several reels of Eryone silk PLA filament on this with very few problems. One of the reels had a few winding issues ruining a couple of prints, but otherwise I've been able to set up a tray of prints and leave it running.

The CR-10S came with a non-stock bed which should have had great adhesion, but it was always only OK. After a lot of tinkering I switched over to a powder-coated spring steel bed, and I think that's my starting point from now on. Pieces stick without any squish required yet pop off nicely. The bottom obviously isn't glass smooth, but instead has a texture to it from the powder coating, but I'm fine with that. I also installed BLTouch auto bed levelling. I've been printing out pieces that use most of the bed area without any lifting. Finally, it has a dual-gear extruder, which is an easy replacement and like the Mini this required the e-steps to be changed, although the CR-10S has an unlocked bootloader so it's fairly easy to enable bed levelling and change e-steps.

As a hobby it's not that expensive. If you're willing to get a low-end kit or pick up 2nd hand you can get started for under £100, and the Ender 3 looks like a decent starter machine that can be bought new for only a little over £100. None of my machines cost me more than £150, although some I've spent more like £250 once you factor in all the upgrades. A £15 reel of PLA or PETG will generally last through quite a few prints unless you're in the habit of printing large functional or decorative pieces. Certainly following most sporting teams or other hobbies work out a lot more expensive in the long run.

On the tinkering and software side, it's been a learning experience tweaking firmware, understanding how they all work, repairing them and replacing parts. If you aren't comfortable disassembling something to replace a part 3D printing still mostly isn't for you. Even resin printing (with fewer moving parts) tends to use LCD screens which they consider consumables so at some point you'll have to open the guts up and replace electronic parts. I've got all of my machines running via OctoPrint so I can remotely kick off prints, some with a built-in camera, some just with a security camera pointing at them. You end up tinkering with Raspberry Pis, setting up OctoPrint, etc, to get a full system. You can buy some of the higher end FlashForge printers etc with remote control built-in, but where's the fun in that?

3D printing is either a time sink or an all-consuming hobby, depending on what way you look at it, but for me it's satisfying, educational and not excessively expensive for the time that it fills. Try it, you might like it.