3D printing: The 8-Year Journey
I joined the 3D printing bandwagon around 8 years ago in 2014. I was 6. Some may say these 8 years were a complete joke, parents fooled into believing this would increase chances on some obscure metric. However, I highly disagree with that. Sure I was very young at the time, but I was still able to utilize these printers for my own projects. I was able to learn and create while maintaining them. I wanted to do it, and I pushed myself to the limit doing what I love.
I have grown from my first printer, with its hassle to maintain and painful speed, to nearly 9 printers consisting of 4 that I’ve built myself (One of which, is still being planned and built right now!). I’m 14 now, and I love this hobby dearly as it allowed me to interact with maker and tinkerer communities that have opened up so many doors for me.
So, after these 8 years…
-What were the experiences I had along the way?
-What were the challenges I had to overcome?
-How was I able to join such a complex hobby at such a young age?
-Why did I choose 3D printing?
-How has 3D printing helped me?
To answer all these questions we have to time travel! Back to 2014, when I got to use a 3D printer for the first time.
This is me, in 2014–2015 with a Tiertime UP Plus 2 3D printer. I was 6. This was in a 3D printing workshop where some architects brought over a few printers to show everyone how to use them. It may just have been the most influential day in my life.
I had been mingling with 3D printing starting in 2014 with the rare videos on Chinese websites for the topic. But that day in 2015 I was able to begin my journey fully.
It was something I wanted to do, it was not forced or anything, just something that I enjoyed. So I did it.
Fast forward to 2016, I got my first printer which was truly mine. It was a Panowin F1, perfectly unreliable but was a literal steel tank.
I worked on a few 3D printed cases for a while with it, and it served me well. I was able to learn why these things break, how to fix them, and when to stop fixing them and buy new parts.
Multiple things can go wrong:
- The hotend clogging
- Bad bed level “screw switch” leading to melting the acrylic bed
- Named the file wrong so it wouldn’t print
- Printing in mid-air because of slicer issues
And.. so on. I had to learn to avoid and fix them when I needed to, and that’s why I still recommend having a really cheap (but useful) printer as your first 3D printer. You learn every single thing about the cheap, plastic, brittle, and simple object it is. You experience the pain of hotend clogs, the pain of slicer issues, the pain of bed leveling, and so on. Once you get fed up enough with it, your able to have an incentive to learn 3D modeling and tolerances so you can mod your own machine and make it more reliable. To squeeze every single bit of performance off of it.
And hey, this one was great for just that. If you ever needed to print something you would have to be extra careful avoiding all the mistakes above.
That’s how I learned the ways. This isn’t a taught class, I had no one to tell me how to do things, I had to figure it out myself if I wanted to print. And that’s how I fell in love with it.
Fast forward a year or two, I got my second printer. This time it was the same unreliability paired with extra pain! Why? Well, a few things went wrong:
- Filament spewed from the heater block occasionally
- Auto bed leveling never working
- REALLY bad tolerances
- Extruder jams
- Etched a groove into the heated bed…
You get the idea. It was a cool thing, the Delta motion system made it look so futuristic. But I learned my lesson with it, just because it's cool and worked well on someone's first-day review of it, doesn’t mean your machine is going to be the same.
I loved it though. It helped me print so many prototypes for an AR headset, I was able to quickly prototype it which taught me why this tech is so important. And it repeated the learning process for my first printer, I fixed (at least tried to) every single thing about it. In the end, though, it was a lost cause. The machine kinda blew itself apart after two years. And that was the end of that.
Fast forward a year or two:
I got a CR-10s, a pretty big printer that tried to be pretty much what I wanted from a 3D printer all along.
- Big build volume
- Open slicers
- Heated bed
- Software that didn’t self-implode when I try to do something
- Support for all filaments
- Easy maintenance
It turned out pretty well, I was able to print a few lamp prototypes with it, a few robotic leg parts, a direct drive mod for itself, and a lot more cool, interesting parts I used from washing the dishes to building more projects.
I loved the glass build plate, its ease of maintenance of it, and how it just worked out of the box. It was fantastic.
And then it broke.
The hotend self-imploded (again). But it was an easy fix! I cut the tube a bit and pushed it back down, suddenly it worked.
And then I decided I was too cool for it, and tried to build my own printer.
That did not end well.
So after my 3rd printer, which I used to build my 4th printer… there were no more printers that worked around me.
Which continued for quite a while…
Until 2020, after a few years of working on my DIY printer, I was fed up and went on a spending spree… I bought 3 different printers.
- A Prusa MK3S clone
- An Ender 3
- A Voron v0.1
The last printer is my most beloved one, I built it myself from parts sourced off of different websites (And to be honest some real sketchy places). I printed the parts in ABS+ on my Prusa and finished it during summer vacation.
And here it is!
Well, that was me building it.
This was the final product. After around a year of mingling in the Voron discord (with complete permission and acknowledgment from my parents by the way), I was able to source, print, build and tune this printer.
It was…
- Faster than anything I’ve had
- Printed far more materials than any other printer I’ve had
- Only printer with Linear Rails I had
- Printed the highest quality parts I’ve personally made
- Great for travel in my suitcase
For the last one, I was in the US for middle school and I decided to bring it over. It traveled around 10k miles to get there and then another 10k miles to get back to China. About time I get an odometer for it!
I learned from all 3 of these printers, that all the other broken ones were worth it! To learn how to fix them, diagnose them, and mod them is an incredible skill and im passionate for it. So when the Prusa started clogging I got it fixed within the hour! Great!
To answer how I was able to join in so early would kinda be luck, I was lucky that there was a 3D printing workshop there, and I was lucky that I spotted videos online. It was a pure coincidence that I began loving it. But I am still cautious of saying “I started 3D printing when I was 6” because people dismiss it so hard that others simply stop responding to you or say it's a lie. So, readers, I hope you keep an open mind for this article.
3D printing is an amazing technology, it has helped me build projects fast and precisely, and it has allowed me to interact with a huge, passionate community who have an intense dedication to this technology.
I fell in love with it mainly from youtube, which I am incredibly grateful for.
So in short, this is an amazing technology with an incredible community with great opportunities and strides for both large industries from automotive and aerospace to small startups all the way towards the hobbyist trying to print DND characters. It's incredible. Although my case might be unique to me, I firmly believe that if you are truly passionate about this tech, then you have the full capability to learn, improve and keep an open mind for it.
Thanks for reading, this article has been in the back of my mind for a while now. Leave a comment if you have anything to suggest in the section below.
Have a nice day~
