I’ve been curious about 3D printing for years. It’s cool technology that looks like fun to play with. The problem was that I didn’t have many ideas about what sorts of things to make with a printer. I’d feel pretty silly if I spent hundreds of dollars on a printer and then didn’t use it for anything after the first week. For that reason, I could never justify the cost enough to actually buy one.
Then a few months ago a friend showed my wife and I some cool things he was doing with his 3D printer. On the way home, we got to talking, and it turns out my wife also had been thinking about getting a 3D printer, but she wasn’t sure she could justify it either. We decided that if both of us were interested, maybe that was justification enough, so we ordered a 3D printer as a Christmas present to ourselves.
It finally arrived a few days ago, and of course I just had to print a “benchy.” That’s a stylized cartoon-like 3D boat commonly used to evaluate 3D print quality. Although small and quick to print, it has a number of features that present a range of challenges to printing systems, and there’s a guide to check the measurements of the resulting printed object.
Now let’s just hope we find something else to print, or that’s a very expensive toy boat.
Note: For those of you who want to know, we bought a BambuLab P1S because Bambu printers have a reputation as being easy to use out-of-the-box without a lot of tinkering. (I don’t mind tinkering, but it tends to become a time-sucking trap, and we wanted to spend our time printing things.) We also needed an enclosed printer because we have cats, and we didn’t want them trying to play with the moving print head. We also got Bambu’s AMS system to automatically switch between 4 spools of printing filament. The benchy model pictured above is printed with Bambu PLA Basic green filament.
Leave a Reply