Thinking of buying a 3D printer. Got a few questions.

[BowdonUK]

I'm thinking of buying a 3D printer but wanted to ask a couple of questions first.

1. Is there a recommended place to buy a 3d printer?

2. What material and supplies do they use? and where would I buy them?

3. Do people download design patterns? Is there some main site people recommend?

4. What is the process of creating my own design? How does that work? Does it need special software etc?

 

[bulb66]

Hi, I'll jump in and answer your questions.

1) Not really, depends on budget.
2) The printer use's stuff called filament and the most common is PLA (Recommended for a new comer) the size of the filament is 1.75mm (most common)
3) You can design them yourself or download from places like Thingiverse, Cults, YouMagine to name a few
4) You can start off with TinkerCAD, a browser base drag and drop style program or jump in at the deep end and use Fusion360.

Once you have a design it will be in an .stl format, for the printer to understand it you use software called a slicer (Cura, RepetierHost, Simplify3D) this software slices the model up and creates .gcode files that the printer can read.

Any other questions please ask .

J.

 

[Haze]

Try spending a bit of time looking through the dedicated thread in the section, I learnt a lot from it before I got mibe