It won’t surprise readers of this blog to learn that, to the extent that I have friends at all, they’re a nerdy bunch. As a result, I’ve become accustomed to hearing them talk about 3D printing. After years of waiting for the technology to mature, I’ve now bought myself one of these magical object-summoning boxes as well, and it’s pretty damned nifty.
After heeding the unusual warning on the box, I got the printer out and set it up. It only took about half an hour. The Elegoo Centauri Carbon is part of a new generation of 3D printers designed for people who don’t want to make 3D printing a whole new hobby. Bambu is another popular brand, but I didn’t like their corporate attitude, so it’s Elegoo for me.
The test print came out in about 20 minutes, and it looked like the picture said it should. That consumed most of the little filament sample included with the machine, so I popped on a 1kg spool of fresh filament and got down to business.
The first practical prints were a couple of sheaths for kitchen knives. I just downloaded one of the many “parametric” models available for this, entering the appropriate dimensions for each knife, then fed them through my slicer software and uploaded them to the printer. I couldn’t get the official Elegoo slicer software to run on my Linux machines, but Orca Slicer works just fine.
In a 3D printing presentation at my ham radio club a few months ago, the speaker mentioned a cool project called Gridfinity, a customizable system for organizing tools, parts, and other small objects. Using one of several online configuration tools, I next set to work on my cluttered office drawers.
It was very satisfying.
I still haven’t designed anything from scratch in 3D CAD software, but I’m starting to learn a couple of programs. So far, though, I’ve found I can usually just search for what I want on one of the numerous 3D file sharing sites (or on the meta-site Yeggi, which indexes them all), and download a ready-to-print model.
Here, for example, is a pinhole aperture adapter for one of my old film cameras.
My Centauri Carbon is a filament or fused deposition modeling (FDM) printer, the most common type, so while it’s great for these sorts of engineered shapes, it makes pretty rough work of highly detailed artistic models. An attempt to print a figurine of a character from a video game was an ugly waste of filament. If I decide I want to print minifigures or other small sculptures, I’ll look into getting an SLA resin printer. For now, though, I’m getting plenty of use out of this one.