I’m on my third 3D printer having started out with a really cheap and cheerful i3 built with a slightly wobbly plywood frame. Things have moved on and the technology available at a modest price point certainly makes the process much simpler while producing high quality results. I have no doubt that there are many hobbyist CNC machines gathering dust in a corner (my own CNC engraver was bought with the intention of engraving PCBs rather than etching them but it’s orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to just get them professionally made in Hong Kong). My 3D printer, though really does pull its weight and allows me to fix many unusual problems around the house. I have used it to replace broken bottle tops (for a jar of vanilla bean paste, which is very sticky and not something you want without a lid), handles for our oven and keys for the meter boxes. These, however, are relatively obvious problems with obvious solutions. What is perhaps more interesting is when you can use the 3D printer to create more unusual solutions.
We live in an old (circa 1700) farmhouse (the farm is now long gone) with a timber frame and brick panels. The previous owners replaced the render on the ground floor panels but, unfortunately, they used concrete rather than lime mortar. This had to be replaced and we were left with panels beautifully rendered in lime. The one fly in the ointment, though, was that the steam outlet from our gas boiler collects condensate that was then dripping onto the new lime mortar – if the outlet pipe had been a few centimetres longer this wouldn’t have been a problem but these drips quickly started to create an unsightly green stain.
One option would have been to print an extension tube, but this would have been quite complex to design and fit. Instead, I opted to exploit the effect of surface tension by creating a clip to go on the bottom of the outlet pipe with a triangular “tongue” of plastic, angled slightly downwards. My theory was that any condensate would then simply flow down the plastic tongue and drip from the point, thus moving any drips about 5cm further out from the wall. After a bit of measuring and trying out a couple of designs, I was quickly able to print the perfect part and it has worked like a charm.
The point I am possibly labouring is that hobbyist 3D printers are not just expensive toys for making replacement parts you could easily buy (or printing pointless models of boats or the Eiffel Tower). Sometimes a 3D printer can allow you to make and fix things that could not be bought or achieved any other way. It can also be quite handy for teaching some basic physics, too!