Hello, 3D Printer!

We got a 3D printer, wooohooo! It feels like just yesterday, 8 or 9 years ago, when my sister and I went to a tech fair to support our brother, who had built a 3D printer from scratch with his friends. I remember being amazed back then, how something could draw an entire figure with plastic and even make parts of it flexible. So interesting and really cool. My fiancé ordered a Creality printer a few weeks ago, mainly to print some parts he needs for his CNC machine that he's building from scratch. But that doesn't mean we can't play with it first and print all sorts of little figures like kids. I just sit there and watch it working, layer by layer.

First, we printed a beer opener. It was suggested as the simplest G-code file, one hour of printing and boom, you get a super cool, solid bottle opener. The edge is at such a good angle that I'm pretty sure it could be used to scrape frost off a car windshield in winter. And we did not make just one, we made two. xD

We did not quite get the slicing right at first, so the second object we wanted to print did not work out. It was late in the evening and we were like, whatever, let's just make another one, you can never have too many of those, ahahh.

After that we actually argued over whose one was nicer, even though they were identical, lol. But I insisted mine was the better one and he eventually had to agree with me. 🥰

He asked me what filament color we should order, since the printer only came with a small amount of white just for testing. And I, logically and very normally, said I want YELLOW, a proper yellow, not greenish, not fluorescent, but that exact shade, like Beatrix Kiddo's suit. Yup! Yellow is ne of the most beautiful colors! <3

Today the spool arrived, and it is not 100 percent that perfect shade of yellow, but it is pretty close, the closest one available from all the options they had. Next up was an octopus, to test how flexible figures will turn out and it came out really great. Of course it took longer than the bottle opener, but not as long as you would expect for something that looks so complex and solid. Most of the work is in the tentacles, and then the printer finishes the head in the last fifteen minutes of printing.

The most interesting part for me is removing it from the build plate and peeling off the support material that holds parts of the figure in place, in this case the octopus's "nose". (:

Didnt it turn out cool?
I'm thinking about what else would be interesting to make, I'm already googling fictional characters from my favorite series and movies, objects from iconic scenes, video game characters, primers and paints for painting them afterwards, basically a whole little mini world is there.

Who would have thought this would become so easily accessible, when less than 10 years ago it was almost completely unknown to most people. Do you have a 3D printer at home, and what do you usually print the most? And what do you think, could we come up with some fun object that would actually sell well? I'm really thinking about that.