The 3D printer had been sitting idle for a long stretch. It was originally bought to print toys for the kids, though in practice buying finished toys is usually the cheaper route. The print quality is not on the level of industrial molds and materials. The one real advantage is the odd, niche item: something that exists but is expensive can be copied at home, and something not on the market can be modeled from scratch. I learned one C4D example and then gave up on that particular path.
I had also looked at the 3D electronic sculpting pens that modelers use and read a little about them. The conclusion was that you need both clients and a high enough skill level—skill being the key—plus electronics factories nearby, or startup toy and plastics factories that need the work. If you don't have plastic-part design ability, that kind of work may still be in demand, but it isn't a simple opening. Electronic-method optimization is another piece; algorithms will gradually take care of more of that later.
A dental example shows how the same idea has already matured. An inlay used to mean taking an impression, sending it to a factory, making a wax pattern, investing it, and casting a metal inlay. Now a CAD/CAM system scans the model and a CNC mill cuts a ceramic or resin inlay, which can be installed and repaired the same day. In 2016 I was too lazy to make the trip and had an inlay made with the CEREC system. A 3D mill cuts a ceramic block that can be fired, shapes the inlay your tooth needs, and a small furnace fires it at high temperature. For molars, gold still seems better, honestly.
This time I installed Ultimaker Cura. The old version was 4.12; now it is 5.1. The install is about 90 MB larger, and it feels faster than before. It also supports my printer model now.
The printer came back out because my wife bought a printed vase. The picture looked good, but the actual result was about the same as what I had printed before. It cost more than 20 yuan—more expensive than a glass vase—so buying glass would have been the better move.
The new job is to print figures: Sailor Moon and Hatsune Miku. Hatsune Miku is also called Miku plus another word; both kids know it, I don't. This time my wife plans to paint them after printing. I never painted my previous prints. It seemed like too much trouble, and I don't care much about how they look.
First, slicing. All the settings I had set up before were gone, so I had to recall them slowly. The first print had no supports. Partway through, the print flew off, and I stopped the machine quickly. Then I remembered another issue: I had chosen hexagon infill. I had wanted the path with the least machine travel to reduce wear on the printer itself. The AI answer said triangles are better, so triangles it was. Honeycomb also counts, I suppose. Hexagon sounds like the machine is doing a lot of moving around, which feels wasteful. The support default was tree supports, but I forgot why. I looked it up again: they are easier to remove and a bit less hard, which is not a big problem. Bed adhesion needs five loops; otherwise the model can detach from the platform and the whole print has to start over.
After about an hour of fiddling—leveling and everything else were fine—it finally printed normally. Normal printing also takes a long time. I played a few games. Where Winds Meet had a queue of more than 250 people at 8 p.m.; by 10 p.m. it was more than 700. I played until almost 1 a.m. Because I don't have an auto power-off socket, I thought about the printer sitting idle all night and wasting electricity, so I waited.
I posted some of this on Mastodon, so I won't go through every detail. Looking at it closely, there isn't that much to say. Maybe the main thing is interacting with people there; it feels like more than the Jike bloggers.
Pictures: the elementary school flea market's rip-off ladder—I figure if people bought, someone got ripped off. The items were all from the second kid, ten yuan total, and some were swapped for real things. The money came from the older kid's stall income.
3D print partial result after support removal.
