Let’s go back to 2016, a time before my son came along, before my partner came along and when I was still a struggling uni student tasked with designing an industrial gearbox given specific parameters from Wiji, the man in charge of the Design of Machine Elements unit.

3D printing was still a relatively new thing since the patents prohibiting the production of personal 3D printers had expired just a few years earlier. There were many companies getting on the bandwagon, producing machines to suit every budget. As a fan of scale modelling and all things DIY I was keen to get involved but my budget hadn’t allowed for it. I’d spent the previous year in Europe on student exchange and this had depleted the coffers.

Researching the various machines turned up the M3D printer and at $500 it was the cheapest on the market at the time. It was a Kickstarter campaign and the reviews were pretty good which had me thinking it would be ok. I managed to convince my old man that this might be a worthwhile investment. Gotta love the guy!

The first print that an M3D owner did was a bracket to fit the filament spool that clipped on to the top of the printer frame. It did this fairly well using the supplied 250gram roll of PLA. I then got to work in my spare time designing a chassis for a car that could  be 3D printed at scale to fit a plastic model kit. Unfortunately this is where the printer started showing its limitations. The first part I printed failed completely and all subsequent tries turned up the same result. I guessed that the detail was too intricate for the printer.

After I received a great result for the aforementioned gearbox design project at uni I thought I’d have a go at 3D printing the 3D model of it piece by piece. The parts would be bigger than those from the chassis so I hoped that they’d have a better chance at working out. The input shaft and bevel gear combination worked ok but it seemed that any round parts came out more oval shape with a weird lump on the side. 

The supports used on other parts was extremely difficult to remove and left the part looking terrible. A trial using ABS filament proved even more difficult. The part wouldn’t stick to the unheated bed and came out with scorch marks. The sales blurb insisted that ABS was possible but knowing what I know now, it just makes me laugh that they’d say this.