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Originally Posted by B_and_D
How did you learn how to do this? Are there instructional videos on the internet?
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Well there a couple of things to learn that you can learn separately and are usual by themselves (depending on your needs/interests).
For 3D printing, there are a bunch of websites with Thingiverse.com being the most popular where you can download designs. So you can find things to print without having to design them yourself. For the actual printing, you take an STL file and use a program called a slicer to convert it into instructions for your specific 3D printer.
That of course brings us to actual printers: there are a bunch of different options and price points. I personally think the sweat spot is the Creality filament printers with the Creality Ender 3 being the one to get if the print area is big enough. It wasn't out when I bought mine -- I went with the Creality CR-10S which has a bigger print area but I rarely use that ability and would rather have an Ender 3. For this topic, there are tons of Youtube reviews and videos.
For making your own designs, the simplest place to start is probably
Tinkercad. It helps to buy a micrometer (ie $10 at Harbor Freight or a little more for one that doesn't eat batteries quite as quickly). There are a ton of CAD options and the most popular semi advanced one with hobbyists is probably Fusion 360. It's free (at least for now) with the hobbyist license. I think the biggest open source one is FreeCAD but it has a bit of a learning curve to it (but that is ultimately what I hope to end up using -- I'm using Fusion 360 for now as it is hard to both learn CAD and learn the tool and 360 doesn't get in your way as much).
Does that help? It's a lot of fun although I didn't realize quite how slow the filament printers are. It takes a while to print something. But once you get it dialed in, it's pretty much doing it's own thing and you don't have to monitor it too closely. So after a while, I was comfortable letting prints run overnight.
In the end, it's another tool in the toolbox. It's amazing what you can make and how precise you can print things. I've printed bolts and nuts and had to tweak things but got them working really well (although more a proof of concept -- they aren't really practical for the most part with where the strength of 3d printed parts is -- some uses but need to be oversized -- it's nicer using metal nuts and bolts).
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