Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 3d printers?

Ok....I am curious about these things....I know they will probably be made in Chingland, so that being said......who has one, what kind do you have, would you buy it again.... What kinds of stuff do you print?

Do you do custom "prints"?

Educate my dumb arse on these things.....at least up to kidee garden on them.

Have been dinking with them for a couple years. Started at work (school). Bought one for the house a year ago. When I was at school was working on a after-school short course to train on them. Five steps:

1) Ideation - Figure out what you want to print. Either from scratch or existing design (eg: Thingiverse).
2) 3D design - I use TinkerCAD a lot. Sketchup is also common. Generate "STL" files.
3) Slicer - I use CURA to slice STL files into Gcode files.
4) Actual 3D print process.
5) Post Processing - Removing skirts, brims, sanding edges, painting if desired, gluing sub assemblies together.

Random thoughts:
> "Build Volume is max" X, Y, Z sizes you can print. Bigger the volume, the bigger the item you can print, the bigger the price...
> A printer where the entire print bed is heated is better than a print bed where only the center 50% is heated.
> Cheap resin is just that. Cheap. Especially when you get into the fancy silk/glittery resins. Many nozzle clogs due to improprieties in the resin. (PITA's).
> If you live in an older house, an enclosure to minimize drafts and capture heat is worth the price.
> Buy some cheap plastic sealable canisters to keep resins in after you break the seal on the vacuum pack. At a minimum big zip lock baggies.
> I had one Creality printer at school. Also bought one for home. About anything you buy for 3D print will be made in China. Just the world we live in.
> One Caveat: I also purchased a Creality 3D scanner. Have never figured out how to get a really nice and accurate scan. Still working on that.

Have fun !

I was into RC gliders way back when I was a kid. Have looked at 3D printing a couple models. Could buy STL files and resin to print a nice electric RC glider for ~$100-$150. However, the electronics would total about $1K. I will get there. But not willing to spend the coin on the electronics at the moment.

we put on a training event for about 1100 people last month

I asked a guy that is heavy into 3D printing to teach a class on how to 3D print a .jt file from CAD and I asked him to recommend an affordable printer (<$300) that would meet the needs of a home user.

He went out and researched some printers and came back with this recommendation, so I bought 3 of them to give away as prizes.

https://www.amazon.com/Sovol-Planetary-Extruder-25-Point-8-66x8-66x9-84/dp/B0BJV3WB2J/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2UP40K20CN8OX&keywords=sovol+sv06&qid=1681080631&sprefix=sovol+sv06%2Caps%2C171&sr=8-1&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.18ed3cb5-28d5-4975-8bc7-93deae8f9840

now is it any good? I can't tell you, I'm just going by his recommendation on the price point I gave him, but he said he was a good printer for the price. He took in consideration print size, capacity, speed and cost of ownership.

he also created a step by step guide on how to print your CAD drawing on it. Turned out it was one of the most popular classes we taught.

Good post. Joggled my memory... Also important to consider:

> Direct Drive extruders will be (tend to be?) more accurate that a Bowden Tube printer
> Auto Bed Leveling makes life much easier
> Max Print Head temp - 250-260*C print heads are good for basic PLA and ABS prints. To use the exotic filaments, require hot end temps up to 300*C, and generally an enclosure...

ETA: Keep In Mind 200*C is almost 400*F. YOU WILL KNOW if your hand comes into contact with a print head at operating temp...

Gentlemen.... Thanks for the replies. I am certainly not ready to drop the coin on one, but I am intrigued.

I figure it is like any other interest....just how far down the rabbit hole does one want to go?

KFWA I will check in to the possibility of a class at the local junior college for the basics....hadn't considered that.

Thanks to you both.

Burt2506

I bought my 10 year old kid an ender dragon for Christmas. I hate dealing with tech stuff but that's what he wanted. I spent hour on Christmas day assembling it from poor instructors and myself having no idea what they even looked like or what they really did.

Somehow I got it together correctly and some neighbors, who the dad is an electrical engineer and the college age son is really into 3d printing, came over and showed us how to use it. There were some tricks to leveling the bed and stuff that were really helpful to be shown by people with experience. So far we've managed to print several toys, a whistle, and some plastic men for grandpas trail set. We haven't really found anything useful to print yet.

I get really frustrated with this kind of thing and computer issues but it's what my kid is into so I suck it up and figure it out with him.

I thought of 1 shooting use for it. My mec sizemaster is 12 gauge but I have the 20 gauge die set for it. It looks like a pain to change gauges so I thought about just buying a lee load all 2 in 20 gauge so I can load some lighter loads for the kids. However, the lightest [bleep] bushing for the lee is 7/8 ounce. I figure we could 3d print some lighter weight bushings with a little design work. I'd like at least a 3/4 ounce bushing and maybe an 11/16ths and 5/8ths. I'll probably end up just buying another sizemaster though.

Bb

I have more than one.

What do you want to do with it?