My daughter told me I didn't have any spare time for a 3D printer.
I knew she was right but that didn't stop me letting the family buy me a Creality Ender3 Pro for a Christmas present. After all - the joy is in the giving ;)
Pretty happy with it so far. Cost around AUD$360 delivered with a roll of Creality PLA filament.
It was already partially assembled, so only took me half a day (with zero prior 3d printing knowledge) to assemble, calibrate and then successfully print a couple of test parts from Thingiverse.
To my inexperienced eye it prints quite nicely "out of the box" - and my daughter who has an older delta style printer was pretty impressed (and slightly jealous).
That was the easy bit.
One of the main attractions for me was the whole CAM thing. Model what you want and have a machine spit it out.
And so we dive into the rabbit hole of CAD programs.
Fusion360 and I just didn't see eye to eye. A friend uses Solidworks for his business and gave me a quick bounce through that which seemed to be very logical, but not an option from a cost perspective.
After investing a few hours I'm making some reasonable progress with FreeCAD. Its starting to make sense and I had a milestone last night when I modeled and successfully printed this lathe change gear:
Thanks for reading!!
Steve
I knew she was right but that didn't stop me letting the family buy me a Creality Ender3 Pro for a Christmas present. After all - the joy is in the giving ;)
Pretty happy with it so far. Cost around AUD$360 delivered with a roll of Creality PLA filament.
It was already partially assembled, so only took me half a day (with zero prior 3d printing knowledge) to assemble, calibrate and then successfully print a couple of test parts from Thingiverse.
To my inexperienced eye it prints quite nicely "out of the box" - and my daughter who has an older delta style printer was pretty impressed (and slightly jealous).
That was the easy bit.
One of the main attractions for me was the whole CAM thing. Model what you want and have a machine spit it out.
And so we dive into the rabbit hole of CAD programs.
Fusion360 and I just didn't see eye to eye. A friend uses Solidworks for his business and gave me a quick bounce through that which seemed to be very logical, but not an option from a cost perspective.
After investing a few hours I'm making some reasonable progress with FreeCAD. Its starting to make sense and I had a milestone last night when I modeled and successfully printed this lathe change gear:
Thanks for reading!!
Steve