Rapid Help
I bought a 3D printer, and here's what happened next.
PROCESS
Francesco Sasia
11/13/20253 min read
So. I bought a 3D printer, nothing fancy and not really news worthy. I've had access to rapid prototyping equipment throughout my career and never really felt the need to own that capability myself, mainly because of the technology if I’m honest, I was interested in a machine that would reliably print stuff, not a third child that would need constant attention and maintenance. However, now Bambu Labs exists, I’m aware they are not a perfect company and they have done a lot to upset ‘the community” lately but they have managed to turn domestic 3d printing from a hobby into a professional and reliable tool that, in my case would facilitate better design work and not end up distracting it. So I took the plunge.
I went for a bit-better-than-basic P1S with the AMS material handling system and in short it has been great, exactly what I was hoping for, no fuss just easy, good quality prints that have something around a 95% success rate (based on my own usage). It’s a word away from the experience I was expecting and that had been putting me off for so long. This isn’t a review, those are easily found elsewhere and much more informative than my ramblings, but, I can confirm that the software is good, the setup is painless, the machine does not fall apart after thirty minutes and the prints are great for what I wanted, to quickly iterate forms and design solutions.
But here's the part that genuinely surprised me. It's not just for design development work. Firstly, the parts are so good now and the materials so diverse that I have been using it to solve multiple annoying jobs around the house that would previously have required ugly and ill-fitting solutions, for example, a semi-circular spacer to compensate for the mounting bracket of my daughters gymnastic rings which land half on and half off the trim of the loft hatch, five minutes in CAD, sixty minutes printing and sorted. Pretty brilliant tool to have and not what I was expecting.
Secondly, MakerWorld. Bambu Lab’s community supported design library. It’s quite amazing, you can search through thousands of designs for any problem you can imagine and there’s a pretty good chance that someone has already had that problem, created a solution and uploaded it to MakerWorld for anyone to download, print and use. It’s so useful, the world does not need more brainpower to be expended on another design for a cycle helmet hook, why not just use one of the several hundred that have already been considered and designed and go do something more fun! It’s really very cool, so much so that apparently there are quite a lot of Bambu Labs owners who have no access to CAD at all and just print solutions they need from MakerWorld
Which brings me to the desk organiser. I have a fairly specific set of tools on my desk. Copic markers, a collection of tapes, a 300mm safety ruler, Mitutoyo calipers, scalpel blades that want to be somewhere they won't end up in a finger. Nothing revolutionary, but nothing that any off-the-shelf organiser has ever quite accommodated properly. So I designed one. A dedicated holder for the markers, a tray for tapes in the middle, a place on the right for post-its and other bits, with scalpel blades sitting safely underneath. Two more storage compartments below, one sized and positioned specifically so the calipers sit level and protected. A front compartment for the things that get picked up twenty times a day. It took me a few hours to design, a few more to print — in PLA, a corn-derived bioplastic that's about as close to guilt-free plastic as currently exists — and it fits my desk and my working habits exactly, and will last as long as anything you'd buy in a shop for probably half the cost.
I don't want to overclaim what this is. It's a desk tidy. But there's something quietly significant about the fact that the gap between "I need a thing" and "I have the thing" has collapsed so completely. No supply chain, no minimum order quantities, no compromise on the brief. Just a problem, a design and a machine in the corner that gets on with it.
In case you’re interested in the desk tidy, you can find it here:
