I bought a 3d printer when I got a hiring bonus for referring a friend. I had played around with one before but a nice turn key one was the real trigger I needed. I bought it without really knowing what all I'd do with it.
I make all sorts of things:
I work for twitch (built bits product initially), so I print a few hundred bits to give out at twitch con for my coworkers, it's a fun thing for them (I expense the plastic).
I needed to replace a bunch of boards on my deck and the dimensions of dimensional lumber have changed. So I could either pay $400 + cost of lumber to get boards cut correctly, or I could pay $175 for the lumber and print abs Shims to make the lumber the correct thickness. Shims at market price were around $75. I was able to iterate on a design and print the 80 shims I needed for about $3 worth of ABS plastic.
I also really enjoy solving problems with the printer in a pretty clean way compared to getting out in the shop. I can, in between matches of dota or pubg, iterate a design and hit print. A match or 3 later I've got a part, or a sub part (mating surfaces) done.
They're also amazing for coming up with templates for making parts out of more time consuming materials like well anything. I can cad a design up in seconds to minutes and hit print. That will get me a part that I can see if it fits. Even wood takes as long as the cad step. And you can iterate a ton.
Another good use case is enclosures and mounts for arduino and ESP32 projects. Lots of little lego parts of eletroics that need to be wired together. Getting them into a reasonable form factor usually requires hot glue and tape to make a shitty ball that's hard to work with, or leaving it on a breadboard which isn't a great form factor, or making a printed enclosure which can hit most of your needs. These can take longer, like 10 hours of iteration but that's amazingly faster than most other methods.
My friend makes furniture. I bought him a printer and he prototypes pieces on the printer. Makes full mockups of living room parts to give to potential customers.
My son does dnd, we print figurines all the time, they're fun weekend projects. He made and painted an infinity gauntlet over the summer which looks pretty sweet.
Have I gotten the $2k out of the printer in absolute value and replacement over mass produced products? No. Maybe about $700 worth of savings there. If you add the DND figures maybe $1000.
If you add the cost of learning, hobbies, time with family, and offsetting iteration and time spent with turn key manufactureres working on a prototype, yes, prolly at least $10k of value (that I wouldn't have spent otherwise).
At the end of the day, for not much space, it makes a lot of physical projects feasible mostly relying on just the computer for the design space.
I make all sorts of things:
I work for twitch (built bits product initially), so I print a few hundred bits to give out at twitch con for my coworkers, it's a fun thing for them (I expense the plastic).
I needed to replace a bunch of boards on my deck and the dimensions of dimensional lumber have changed. So I could either pay $400 + cost of lumber to get boards cut correctly, or I could pay $175 for the lumber and print abs Shims to make the lumber the correct thickness. Shims at market price were around $75. I was able to iterate on a design and print the 80 shims I needed for about $3 worth of ABS plastic.
I also really enjoy solving problems with the printer in a pretty clean way compared to getting out in the shop. I can, in between matches of dota or pubg, iterate a design and hit print. A match or 3 later I've got a part, or a sub part (mating surfaces) done.
They're also amazing for coming up with templates for making parts out of more time consuming materials like well anything. I can cad a design up in seconds to minutes and hit print. That will get me a part that I can see if it fits. Even wood takes as long as the cad step. And you can iterate a ton.
Another good use case is enclosures and mounts for arduino and ESP32 projects. Lots of little lego parts of eletroics that need to be wired together. Getting them into a reasonable form factor usually requires hot glue and tape to make a shitty ball that's hard to work with, or leaving it on a breadboard which isn't a great form factor, or making a printed enclosure which can hit most of your needs. These can take longer, like 10 hours of iteration but that's amazingly faster than most other methods.
My friend makes furniture. I bought him a printer and he prototypes pieces on the printer. Makes full mockups of living room parts to give to potential customers.
My son does dnd, we print figurines all the time, they're fun weekend projects. He made and painted an infinity gauntlet over the summer which looks pretty sweet.
Have I gotten the $2k out of the printer in absolute value and replacement over mass produced products? No. Maybe about $700 worth of savings there. If you add the DND figures maybe $1000.
If you add the cost of learning, hobbies, time with family, and offsetting iteration and time spent with turn key manufactureres working on a prototype, yes, prolly at least $10k of value (that I wouldn't have spent otherwise).
At the end of the day, for not much space, it makes a lot of physical projects feasible mostly relying on just the computer for the design space.