10 Things I Learned From My 3D Printer: An Early Adopter's Diary

How can I possibly describe what it's like using a 3D printer for a year? It's not easy. It's sort of like asking someone why they like sunsets or the opera. Instead, let me describe the 10 things I learned over the last year—and what you can expect to go through yourself after you open the box of what I call "the best Christmas present ever."

1. The First Few Hours Are Glorious
When you first get the printer, you believe yourself to have Tony Stark–like resources and abilities. There it was, my XYZprinting da Vinci 1.0($231.74 at Walmart): plugged in, the transformer of the power supply humming back at me, daring me to be the next Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak. Three hours later, my wife was in the kitchen with me, feigning her excitement over the sample "twisted vase"; the file for it came preloaded on the printer's SD card, so I printed three of those vases.

But one evening before bed, I found myself staring at the printer and realizing I had been "displaying" it in my poor wife's living room like the infamous "leg lamp" from A Christmas Story. ("Frah-GEE-LAY—it must be Italian!"). Karen didn't break it the way the wife in that movie did, but she let me know she wanted her view of the backyard back.

2. After the 15th Sample Print, It's Time to Grow Up
You can only print so many vases and Yoda heads before you become disillusioned with owning a 3D printer. You soon start to realize that whoever programs the printer's sample files optimized those files in the "G-code" (the code that tells the printer how to make each item). What about files online? Sure—there are thousands of parts files you can download from MakerBot's Thingiverse website. But you quickly realize that close to 90 percent of those files are useless electronic flotsam. (Oh no, did I waste my Christmas list wish?) I'd printed my son a Pokémon. My daughter got her My Little Pony figurine. My oldest got a batarang. My wife got a chicken and a dinosaur. Each time, the result was the same: a "Thank you, Daddy!" followed by 30 seconds of adoration, and then that sense of, "Okay, did you get me a real present?" You start to feel like a guy telling a joke who has to emphasize how funny the punch line is. "Why don't other people think these things are as cool as I do?"

3. There Are Three Phases to Owning a 3D Printer
1. The Tchotchke phase. These are useless things that were fun to print that I could give as gifts to my kids. They go from "great!" to "yawn" in about an hour.

Dino

2. The Utilitarian phase. Items made from files from online libraries that would actually be used for something in our day-to-day lives. Hinge broken on our Coleman cooler? There's a file I can download and print that will fix that, and I'll look like Jonathan on the HGTV show Property Brothers—sans the perfect hair and plaid shirt.

3. The Designer phase. Things I would have to design from scratch, to make something that hasn't previously existed in the known physical universe.

Setting these goals for myself turned out to be bittersweet. But at various points in your ownership, you hit plateaus. You're thrilled that you were able to get the printer to do what it did, but you're always wondering, "How do I get it to do what that guy online did?"

4. 3D Printing Makes You Feel Alone at first
There are two types of filament deposition–style 3D printers on the market now. There are expensive ones ($2,000 and up) that can do really cool stuff, and use plastic filament you can buy anywhere. Then there are the sub-$1,000 contenders. These printers are gateway drugs—and you soon learn that the companies that make them are more interested in selling you their proprietary filament (for a premium) than helping you make amazing things in your home. You then realize that their proprietary filament and software can't make the coolest things online, and that you've bought yourself into a corner—surrounded by vases and Yoda heads. The feeling is a lot like seeing a recipe for Minion donut holes on Pinterest and then comparing the results to the picture you'd pinned.

I was very much alone with regards to the printer company. Emails would go unreturned. The manual (all 10 pages of loosely translated Chinese-obvious stuff like "make sure you printer plugged into wall socket unit") was useless. I was very much left with the feeling that as long as I was faithfully wasting hundreds of yards of lucrative subpar plastic filament, they were perfectly content to take my money. I felt the way Elaine from Seinfeld did in that one episode where she thought she was dating a handsome man, only to find out he was standing in the "good light."

5. 3D Printing Forces You to Look for Help
Until this experience, I'd never joined an online forum in my 44 years on Earth. Many of the 3D printing forums are filled with equally disgruntled printer owners who have even more Yoda heads hanging around than you do. And the cheaper the initial cost of the printer, the more prolific the forums are. Usually the dialogue on these forums went something like this:

Consumer: I bought a 3D printer and I'm having a lot of trouble.
Forum Guru: What kind did you get?
Consumer: A BrandXXX 1.0A from Amazon.
Forum Guru: Oh, I'm so sorry for you. (sighs, shakes head)
Consumer: Wait, why? What did I do wrong?

It hurts at first, like going to a gym and discovering that you're the only overweight person there. But soon you realize it will be okay. The forum guru pointed me to a saved list of "mods and improvements" that I had to complete before the printer would be able to print the "utilitarian" stuff or perfect renditions of those really awesome Art Deco vases (which looked like pinecones when I tried to print them). I found that many of the mods were really simple, and I loved that I could actually use the printer I bought to make parts to fix the printer.

Raptor Claw

Where are these parts, you ask? It turns out that there's a "dark Web" of Thingiverse full of parts people have designed to make their cheap printers not only functional, but behave like the $2,000-plus models. There's an entire economy and community of people, not unlike the popular VR world Second Life, who are devoted entirely to upgrading and modifying printers. Mods and hacks ranging from keep-it-simple-stupid easy to how-did-they-even-think-of-that-it's-genius upgrades.

I'd like to lie and tell you this was an easy process, but it wasn't. It was an emotional time—across about two months' worth of fixing. But after spending all that time searching, printing, installing, and adjusting, I had a printer that could print anything I could find online. A rocket ship, for example, that failed the first five times I tried printed perfectly after the last hack was installed.

6. Mods Take You From Yawn Dad to Super Dad
I made my youngest son a velociraptor claw. Not just any claw. It was a claw that had been laser-scanned and digitized from the Museum of Natural History. I wasn't able to print it out before the upgrades, but now I was Indiana Jones with a roll of plastic on the wall.

When the extruder motor pulled back, I saw it. It was beautifully horrific and detailed. I was pretty jazzed, and got all art-class intoxicated. For effect, I took some mud from the backyard and pushed it into some of the crevasses to simulate how the claw would look right after being pulled from a dig site. To my wife's dismay, I then sharpened the very end of the claw with some fine sandpaper and handed my 10-year-old something that made his post-modern- Pokémon-PlayStation-DS mouth drop open. His reaction signaled my graduation from the "useless thing" phase: He cleared store-bought stuff off of his bedroom shelves to make room for the claw I'd printed.

I heard his two older siblings saying "Whoa, where did you get that?" as I made my way back upstairs to my office, hair unkempt, covered in dust and burnt plastic smell permeating my clothes. Music, sweet music to my ears.

7. 3D Printing Kicks Everything Up a Notch
I remember the first "phase two" things I printed after the claw. The first was a custom-designed birdhouse for my neighbor. It used old DVDs in its base to make a removable floor for cleaning, and it was pretty to look at. I made three as gifts, and each time I watched someone unwrap one, the recipients were genuinely surprised at the nice design and level of detail. They didn't believe me when I told them I had printed it in my office.

The second item was even better than the birdhouse. See, I also own a DJI Phantom($799.95 at Amazon) drone, and similar to the 3D printer, there were parts of the copter that needed upgrading and modding if it was going to fly properly. Right up on the top of the list was a bigger battery, which in turn required a bigger battery cover (so said bigger battery wouldn't fall from the sky and kill someone—probably you).

I learned in phase two that if you can think of something you need, a nerd before you who thought the same thing has made the file for it already. So I diligently searched for and found the files on Thingiverse. I loaded them into the da Vinci software and started printing. Three hours later, I had the battery box on my copter, fitting with store-bought precision. After some very light sanding, the Phantom was up in the air flying around the field behind my house; it lasted 25 minutes this time, versus 12 to 13 minutes beforehand.

My family's attitude began changing during phase two. Instead of my bringing objects to them, expecting adoration, they'd come to me and ask "What are you doing with that piece?" and "How did you get it to do that?" Finally, the best question of all, which signaled the completion of my journey from phase two to phase three: "Daddy (Honey), can you make me something? I need it to do this." (hands me paper with drawing)

Insert Tim Taylor Grunt here: Argh argh argh!

8. 3D Printing is a Big Time Commitment
Looking back, I can't overstate the value of the useless-Yoda-head phase. A 3D printer isn't like anything you've ever used before. The closest thing I can compare it to is the first laser-printers. Remember how the paper would jam all the time? Or how you had to shimmy-shake the toner cartridge to make an error message go away? That's what it's like owning a 3D printer.

Soon after getting one, you feel like Michael Bolton from Office Space: When something unexpected happens, you want to hit the printer with a baseball bat. But after a while you become more like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, confidently standing on the rock, deftly nailing fish with a metaphorical filament spear. By the eight-to-10-month mark, you "know" your printer. You know what it can and can't do. You know what the procedure is for "all things awful." You think you could write the manual that would probably shorten someone's learning curve to four weeks.

And then something truly wonderful happens: You realize you can make things no one has thought of yet.

9. 3D Printing Ignites Your Imagination
Once I'd had my printer for ten months, I started saying to myself, "You know what someone needs to make? Someone needs to make something that does XXXX." And then you realize: You're that someone and you can make XXXX—or even YYYY. But how to make something that doesn't have a Thingiverse file?

There are a slew of free 3D printing design programs online: software that lets you draw the thing you want to make, and then output the file the printer needs. Autodesk makes one called Tinkercad that a child could use with a few minutes of tutorials. I used it—and still do—but ultimately I chose to work with Google SketchUp (another free program), mainly because it has a huge support community and a thousand training videos online to learn from.

So what can you make? Whatever your printer can fit in its bed. Mine has an 8-by-8-by-8-inch capacity, which is pretty big for a $495 printer. One weekend before I went camping, I realized I needed something to get my small ham radio antenna up in the trees. Other "hams" had made "fishing reel slingshots," by hurling lead fishing weights tied to a spool of line up over a tree. The plans online were all Rube Goldberg-y and ugly, using wires, cable ties, and tape. I thought, "I could make something really nice," and so I opened Google SketchUp and started drawing, using measurements off of the Walmart slingshot I'd bought for $5. Not too long after, I pulled my own custom version out of the printer.

Printer With Prints

Once I got into off-road driving, I began wondering whether I could make some of the accessories I saw on everyone else's trucks. Yes. And so I set about making a roof-rack shovel mount for my 2005 Nissan Xterra. The very next day, a man at the gas station stopped me and asked where I'd bought it. When I told him I'd 3D printed it myself, he offered me money on the spot to make him one for his truck.

I made the friend who bought me the printer in the first place a custom light bar mount for his kayak, so he could go flounder fishing at night. More people asked where we had bought it.

That same friend's father had a boat in Myrtle Beach with a broken shower drain. It was an older piece, and no one in town had the part we needed to repair it. After getting some measurements, we were able to design a replacement piece and print it out the same day.

10. 3D Printing Has the Opposite Effect of Most Technology
Owning a 3D printer will propel you into a community with people. Two types of communities, in fact.

There are communities of end users who will invite you to share what they've learned, either in person at one of the popular Maker Faires, or online via forums, Skype, or the YouTube videos they produce, often at their own expense. When you are pulling out your hair in your learning phase, plenty of people are waiting to meet you, PM you, and teach you things. People I would never have met otherwise have become good friends as a result. Moreover, you go from being the "noob" to being the "guru" pretty fast. You advance through the ranks like a 3D printer Boy Scout, ultimately becoming an ABS Scout Leader and helping the many other people underneath you who are still learning.

The parts you make also have another effect on your life. I'm able to make things for my kids, but it requires a connection to them. I have to ask, "What do my kids really like, and what would blow them away if I printed it for them?" For example, my son has asked me to make him a Thorn gun from his Halo Xbox game. He's delirious with anticipation as I research what's out there that can be printed.

In other words, the printer requires connection to your community of family and friends to go from "leg lamp" to useful. People now know they can ask me to make things if something is broken, or if they want a Minecraft cookie cutter like the one they saw on Pinterest. I've become a "node," a local hub capable of making impossible things become possible in my office. It starts conversations that inevitably lead to "Hey, could you make me..." questions, and none of these conversations would ever have existed without the printer.

Pretty soon, these communities become bigger than you. I've just joined a global group called eNABLE, in which people print prosthetic hands for children. This is the point where you realize you're like one of those first people who had a cell phone or a website. You're one of those first kids on The Facebook. Sure, 3D printing seems like a novelty at first, but now it doesn't feel like a novelty. Any technology that has historically brought us closer together seems to flourish and last and grow exponentially. It becomes "sticky." This is happening for me, with touch points across the hall and across the world as a result.

After my first year of owning a 3D printer, I am Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, staring at my printer and saying, "You make me want be a better man."