Three-D-Printer

A one-of-one custom FDM 3d printer (2021)

I had luckily stumbled back into the hobbyist FDM 3D Print'iverse just before the pandemic shut the world down. Enabled by a wealth of spare time to sink into learning professional CAD software, and inspired by an active open source community, I aspirationally determined that my pandemic goal was to design and build my very own 3D printer.

At the time, I was just fourteen years old and had no practical knowledge of the engineering design process. To solve this predicament, I did what any teenager would do—I spent thousands of hours watching YouTube videos.

Fresh off a few months of Fusion 360 and Solidworks training videos, I started iterating. During breaks between Zoom classes, I meticulously translated each idea into increasingly complex CAD assemblies. Unburdened by trivialities like specifications or planning, I often found myself designing myself into a corner. My age-appropriate solution was brute force: if I got stuck, I would start over.

After a winter of meticulous iteration, I felt ready invest my hard-earned sheckles in an unproven, untested, and original design by an equally unproven, untested, and unoriginal teenager.

I would go so far as to call it a minor miracle that the thing I built with a pile of parts ordered off of Aliexpress, Amazon, and Misumi actually worked. It printed things!

Little boats, tchotchkes, and plastic animals soon adorned my desk. But the most significant aspect was that the printer could make more parts for itself. Consequently, a year of revisions, modifications, and replacements ensued. I “Ship of Theseus’d” the printer into a machine that rivaled the most capable hobbyist setups in its class.

In its most enduring configuration, my printer has contributed parts to almost every project I’ve undertaken, from high school competition robotics to countless revisions of packaging for tiny pencil parts.

At the end of the day, I’m grateful that my younger self’s naïve and ambitious printer project—enabled by a once-in-a-lifetime global—was a gateway drug to mechatronics and engineering design.