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I have been 3D printing now for ~6 or so years, and have two machines. The older machine I have was built out of a kit, and I have been upgrading/printing better parts for it since. I bought a new machine about a year ago, and it has been great - but I just can't leave anything stock!

The newer machine I have I decided to upgrade for a variety of reasons. New control board, stepper motor drivers, touch screen, and a single board computer to enable me to monitor it remotely through the interwebz.

Biggest thing, is it is nearly silent. Before (and the other printer) you could hear it a couple rooms over. Not super loud, but a faint R2D2 being violated kinda noise. If in the room it was fairly noisy.

The machine is a Creality Ender3 - which is a fairly cheap and very popular printer. The stock control board and screen are housed in a small compartment at the front of the printer. The upgrades required the electronics to be moved to the rear (which I now treat as the front) and I printed compartments to hold all the new stuff.

Here are some pics, if anyone is interested in seeing them :

Here are the printed compartments with the new control board, stepper drivers (orange boards on the control board,) raspberry pi single board computer, and voltage regulator for the pi.

2019-08-16_02-17-33 by Paul Taylor, on Flickr

Everything slid into the back of the printer. I am going to cut plexiglass or print covers for the compartments.

2019-08-16_02-17-09 by Paul Taylor, on Flickr

Everything more or less together. I am printing a holder for the little camera, and have some wiring to organize but the machine is back up and printing. I printed a case for the top touch screen that provides printing through wifi and SD card. Bottom scree is stock I just modded the bracket to allow it to be mounted vertically and on the back of the printer. It displays realtime datat on movement, temps, and time remaining.

2019-08-16_02-15-48 by Paul Taylor, on Flickr

Very cool Paul. My youngest son has been using his home 3-D printer to create prototypes parts for the company he works at. They have been good about providing all he needs at their expense. He's been getting major kudos from the engineers where he works.

Very cool stuff.

That is awesome I want to try 3D printing sometime. I am going to look up those parts you listed

I have been at it for a while, an early adopter of consumer level machines. The first printer I bought (and still have/use) is a Printrbot Jr. Unfortunately they are no longer around, as the cheap chinese machines (like my Ender3) basically murdered companies like Printrbot. It is a shame though, as Printrbot had some really cool things going for it. They also pretty much invented the affordable machine, I paid ~700 for it 6 or 7 years ago which was an unheard of price. Despite it's frame work being made of laser cut wood - the little machine keeps on trucking, deliver fantastic quality prints with very little maintenance. Granted, it looks like a science project gone wrong lol.

The Ender has been a great machine as well, and since it is "open source" there are a ton of ways to upgrade it. It has a few issues out of the box - but once those are handled it is a great machine. Pretty crazy that you can buy them for less than $300 dollars.

It seems like the vast majority of people with these machines buy them, hope they work out of the box. If they don't, they eventually get frustrated and abandon the whole deal as it seems people now days do not want anything other than instant result. If they get it working, then they just download things of Thingiverse (a great repository of 3d modeled stuff for printing) which eventually gets a bit old, and they do not want to take the time to learn how to 3d model their own designs. Then the machines get sold lol.

Seems few people buy them, learn the ins/outs and then learn to model their own designs. Seems like about 2%. It is a shame because it isn't a horrible thing to learn. You can start simple with a web-based app called TinkerCAD, then move up to Fusion360 by Autodesk. Typically anything Autodesk is $$$$ - but they will actually give you a free license to Fusion360 if you are a "maker" and non-commercial. This is quite odd, as I used to be heavy into CAD, and competed in competitions in high school - and the only way I could afford AutoCAD was to win, as you got a copy for a prize. Lol. TinkerCAD makes it pretty easy, but is limited in what you can do. Fusion360 is professional level, and the abilities of the software is very advanced, yet it is user friendly for the most part and there is a ton of online how-to videos.

I am working on a set of custom tail light bezels for a work project at the moment, and I will print test parts. Then these go through a few revisions and are what we want, we will then use my 3D model to CNC the actual parts. Doing all the test parts in plastic is a giant savings money wise, and I can do things quicker since I have the machines.

The materials have come a long way too, it is boggling how many different filaments there are and materials. ABS, PLA, PETG, PETT, TPU, etc. I have been using a US made brand (3D Solutech) that is usually cheaper (15-20 bucks a spool) and great quality.

I am already eyeballing my next machine, bringing the total up to three.

I needed non-marring clamps for weatherstripping and other stuff at work, so I printed some :

2019-08-17_10-34-47 by Paul Taylor, on Flickr

And I printed some stack covers for our shop Gasser, cause I couldn't let us just use tennis balls like everyone else :

2019-08-17_10-33-28 by Paul Taylor, on Flickr

Nice work Paul. I'm going to suggest my son read your posts here.

Very nice work.
Rob

My wife is getting me a 3D printer for Christmas. When I saw your post about Fusion 360, I decided to take a look at it. That is some amazing software. I used Autocad to design quartz ware for the reactors at work years ago and thought that it was pretty hot. The Fusion 360 pretty much makes it look primitive. Of course, it is significantly more complicated than Autocad, but there is so much info on you tube and the Autodesk sites that it is possible for an old guy to start getting the feel for it.

I down loaded the demo software about a week after your post, and have been playing around with it since then. I just finished a drawing of a Wilwood 12.19 inch disk rotor and a rotor hat that turned out pretty nice. I will be taking some more measurements to finalize my rotor hat, then see if we can build it at the shop.
My next project for Fusion 360 is to design a center console for my 510 that can be 3D printed. I'm still a long way from getting a handle on some of the features yet to make that happen, but am having a lot of fun learning.

- Guy

That rotor looks great!

You can get a free license for Fusion if you are a startup, or a "maker." That way you don't have to worry about the demo expiring.

I used to compete in AutoCAD in high school in the mid 90s, and it amazes me how far the software has come, and what it is capable of.

Fusion is also nice because of the huge amount of online tutorials and videos.

Do you know what kind of printer you are getting?