3D Printing as a hobby

Last year, my lovely wife gave me a 3D printer for my birthday. It’s a version that requires a good deal of tweaking and patience to get working properly, but when it works and the print turns out to be fairly nice I’m really happy. When I have to spend over an hour just to get it to print decently, I’m quite frustrated. Multiple hours of work with no success, I’m ready to put the thing in the closet for a couple of months again.

I wish I could come up with something clever to say about my relationship with my 3D printer. Maybe I can turn this into a post about how fruitless it is to spend hours to make a poorly designed tool do the job that a well designed tool could do in one-tenth the time, but I don’t think I can at the moment. I need to go and check if my test print hasn’t moved an inch or two on the x-axis and is currently partially a rat’s nest.

I love designing something useful and having it print successfully. I just feel like I currently have a low-end PC when I know a mid-range Mac would be so much better. Now I miss using my MacBook Pro.