Long-time readers of the blog might remember that a few years ago I bought a Neptune 4 Pro. This was back when we lived in London, I had a bit more spare time on my hands – as most of my job involved talking more than coding – and I was playing around with a few electronics projects, for which a 3D printer is a great companion.
Things have changed, I have less time to dedicate to these particular hobbies, my work became a lot more coding-heavy, and between the overall existential dread of the world, and the general race to throw expertise out in favour of LLMs is not a great situation to live in to have the energy to spend on extracurricula.
And in addition to that, turns out the Neptune 4 Pro, which was a good tool back in London in an overly dry apartment where humidity needed to be consistently added, didn’t quite have the same appeal in the East of England, where humidity particularly in spring and autumn is quite reasonable. And similarly, moving the printer to a room where I’m not spending all my time, and thus has often an overall lower temperature, turned out to complicate things.
While I did already buy a filament dryer back in London, as some filament arrives just horribly humid to begin with, figuring out a way to print directly out of that turned out to be a quest in and by itself. I spent days toying with different pivot points and pulleys to have a working filament guide straight out of the dryer into the printer, to no avail. And that was after I decided to take on the common advice of upgrading the springs to silicon spacers, and listened to Functional Print Friday’s advice about a different Neptune 4 variant (the Max) and have it warm up the bed and redo the calibration after every print.
Now, these are all weak points of the particular printer I had, in the situation I am in — none of those are a reason to say that 3D printing isn’t feasible, or useful, or fun. But they are part of the reason why I decided that I don’t need a 3D printer, and I’m unlikely going to get another one in the short to medium term, much as I had my eyes on the Bambulab H2C, or the Snapmaker U1. Things might change in the future, obviously.
The reason why I’m even writing about this at all, is that I have not seen before any write up of people who gave up on 3D printing. When you look at YouTube you see a lot of people including 3D printing in their processes, or that decide that one model is better than another, but you’d have to look explicitly to find a video of a creator going “I no longer use a 3D printer” — they’re creators, there’s little incentive to even say that!
And I think that it’s worth for people to know that there are people giving up. And indeed, 3D printing might just not be for everyone, despite some of the 3D printing enthusiasts that have been trying to convince everyone that the world is moving towards a direction in which 3D printers are so ubiquitous that you are more likely to print your own objects than buy them from AmazExpress.
Before deciding to get rid of the printer, I went and looked back on what I did print with it in the few years I have owned it. There’s obviously been a long list of calibration prints, which is a given for the type of printer I ended up buying. And there’s been the number of prototype for projects I’ve been working for, which were the original reason for me to buy it in the first place. But the vast majority of the material and runtime for the printer has been spent on Gridfinity boxes.
For those who are not into 3D printing that much, Gridfinity was the first large-mindshare standard for grid-based organization objects. Mostly, but not exclusively, containers. It might sound grander than it effectively is, but the idea is that it provides a blueprint around which you can design compatible interlocking bins, holders, and other “building blocks.”
It’s an interesting idea overall, and the grid layout can be extremely useful. I even designed and published my own bins for a few things I couldn’t find already designed, or for which none of the existing designer could help me with — because of course there’s a number of free, and not free, Gridfinity bin designers nowadays. Just like there are competitors to the original Gridfinity design to cover slightly different needs.
And this is where things get… curious. While I have found Gridfinity bins to be a great way to organize my worktop in may cases, a couple of years after starting I do regret a few things. In particular, because of the many different battery formats I ended up stocking for sensors and buttons, I had printed multiple Gridfinity bins to keep batteries organized: CR2032, CR2570, CR2, etc…
All of those require you to open up the packages and slot the batteries into the printed receptacles, with sufficient gap so that they shouldn’t form a circuit from each other. But as it turns out, most of these end up discharging significantly faster in those bins than in their original blister — which meant I ran through a lot more batteries than I would have liked. I’m not entirely sure how this comes to be, as I don’t think the chemistry or the electrical characteristics are meant to be affected by the blister, but I have compared batteries from the same lot, on our coffee scale — the opened ones lasted just over two months, while the ones straight out of the blister are still in use nearly four months later, which is in line with the expected yearly battery change routine.
This, together with the lack of purchasable Gridfinity-compatible boxes, disenchanted me quite a bit from keep printing bins for things. While I did print a couple of boxes that would fit the bins myself, they’ve been less than stellar, and I did hurt my thumb quite a bit when trying to open one of them after closing it up.
The second largest group of printed items, have been another usual story for 3D printers: tat. A lot of it, for Christmas, for Halloween, just for the sake of it… I have not bothered with fidget toys, or articulated prints, or silk and multi-colour prints, but it’s not like those are not already flooding the stalls of local fairs and arts and craft events — which honestly saddens me, because I have yet to see a 3D printing booth at one of those peddling their own designs, most of them are the same set of toys you can find on Printables or Thingiverse, with the only value proposition of not requiring you to own a 3D printer in the first place.
Now that does not mean that there has been no utility out of owning a 3D printer, for me — a few of the designs I published I’m still using — including the replacement plug for the IKEA coat rack, which I ended up finding (obviously) a couple of days after printing my own replacement. But even those are mostly excuses. The most interesting design work I did was the inserts for Everyone Else Thinks This Game Is Awesome, but even that feels like a contrived reason to own a 3D printer, and honestly it probably could or should have been done with a laser cutter and some LDF.
Some of my designs were also silly and pointless, thankfully not in particularly dangerous ways, but let me just say I had to learn a lesson about storing whiteboard markers horizontally — and throw out the pointless vertical holder for my desk whiteboard. Whiteboard that I have not used in the new house ever since we moved in either!
In terms of useful prints, I guess the ones I’m still using quite a bit are my blister-busters, which I use to take my metformin pills (diabetes treatment) out of the blisters that they’re sold in, in Europe — I store those in bottles for use at home, because they’re handier, but I understand perfectly well why these are distributed as blisters instead. But that might be a topic for another time.
I have already mentioned above Functional Print Friday – who I used to watch before he gaslit his audience with “I want to spend more time with the family… that’s why I’m doing as many video as before, but half of them will be Patreon-only” – for a while I have considered it to be a possible inspiration to make better use of the 3D printer I had, but it turned out to be a dead end. Most of the functional prints in the last year have been fairly niche (while it was interesting to see how the radon extraction fan worked, and slightly more scary to see how it ended up being re-used for fabrication fumes extraction, it is not something particularly relatable in England), and more and more of those became the realm of a full blown workshop, rather than something useful for an individual.
The last sort-of-interesting project I saw that I could relate to was the tool holder print-in-place, and even that requires a 3D printer capable of dual-material (not just dual-colour, since it requires printing TPU with PLA supports), and the H2D Combo starts at a whopping £1449 at the time of writing definitely not the realm of personal hobbyist printer at that point.
This reminds me I need, one of these days, to write up about a trend that I noticed already: many of the widely viewed YouTubers are US-based for practicalities that go beyond the universality of the English language: there’s no way that you would be able to keep so much of a workshop around in a home in England, even owning it, so either you have the capital to rent a commercial unit, or you’ll always end up being in a cramped up space and have to move things in and out of storage units, like Techmoan appears to.
What I want to say with all this is that 3D printers are definitely cool — and if you are into designing or trying different things, or just happen to have the time and willingness to play around. They have clearly revolutionized the world of prototyping and made so many things possible that weren’t before.
But any of the suggestions that 3D printers will find themselves in every home, or at least in as many homes as document printers, are in my opinion far disconnected from the real world. Short of them becoming as reliable as Star Trek’s replicators, these are handy tools in the hands of a few, cool toys in the hands of the wealthy, and noise for the vast majority of people.
