I’m going to have access to a 3D printer for a few days. I know two friends who’ve used them, but it’s only been for art and figurines, or professional purposes.

Are there any other cases you can think of where a custom-printed item is better than the myriad of mass-produced plastic items?

  • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    44·
    4 days ago

    Are there any other cases you can think of where a custom-printed item is better than the myriad of mass-produced plastic items?

    None at all. 3D prints are almost always worse than injection moulded plastic. Only if you need a very specific custom thing. Or it’s just convenient/fun to make your own.

    • AmbitiousProcess (they/them)@piefed.socialEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      3D prints are almost always worse than injection moulded plastic

      Entirely depends on your use case. 99% of the time it won’t matter to most people with a 3D printer.

      If I’m making a Gridfinity setup for my desk, it doesn’t matter if it’s injection molded, it sits in my desk and doesn’t come into contact with any food or liquids and isn’t put under high stress. If I’m making attachments for my IKEA Skadis board, it doesn’t matter if they’re injection molded, nothing I’m putting on them needs highly scratch-resistant plastic or marginally heavier weight capacity. If I’m making replacement mounting for a bar on an item I own to make it more convenient to use, it doesn’t need injection molding to work just as effectively as an injection molded part, it’s holding a few grams of weight pulled by gravity and has no other stresses or contact with food or liquids.

      Injection molding is only necessary if:

      • You need a more food-safe part without layer lines
      • You need a part that is absolutely as strong as it physically can be with that plastic material, even if it will only be slightly stronger than the 3D-printed part’s layer bonds
      • You need to mass produce an item at scale very quickly, and have the upfront demand to cover the very high cost of tooling, custom molds, (thousands of dollars per individual mold) logistics, etc.

      If I wanted molds made for all the things I’ve printed to have them injection molded instead, I’d be in debt hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.

      Not a single thing I’ve printed would have been cheaper, truly better quality (unless I had simply picked a badly made design in the first place), or more usable if it was injection molded, and I’ve been printing things regularly for the past 8 years.

      • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        For lots of stuff 3D printing makes a lot of sense.

        Recently I bought a 3-pack of little baskets from the dollar store for $1.25, which are the perfect size to hold quarter sheets of paper. I know I could have researched it on thingiverse, gone to the makerspace, and printed one, but I think it was faster and cheaper to buy it at the store.