At Christmas I bought my son a Ender3 3D printer after seeing his aunties excellent creations.
The initial setup was daunting but after watching some great how to vids and about an hour or so later, We had the first prints away.
It took some time and lots of mistakes to fine tune the settings but after a week of frustration it was printing no problem.
Thanks to a wonderful website called thingiverse you can get free files called stl or gcode where you can download and put onto a SD card which can then be inserted into the printer and printed off.
The above image is a print that I downloaded of Marty McFly from Back to the future and as you can see, the printer even managed the small detail in the skate board. I even went on to print Marty’s side kick “Doc Brown” too.
After we started building up some plain prints it was time to add so colour and bring the models to life. I purchased some primer and acrylic paints and sat down at my table to paint like da Vinci. Ok more like a infant but I tried. This was tricky but as a first timer to model painting I was quite surprised at the results.
Another great website and also free to use is tinkercad which for beginners is excellent. The site gives you some tutorial lessons to interact with and when your ready you can design your own 3D files to print on your printer.
I kept it simple and designed a Father2b key ring, then scaled it down and printed it on the Ender3 and once painted, it now sits on my keys looking great in the pink and blue colour theme of my banners and logos
Do you have a 3D printer?
share your designs
