Define “worth it”??

For many, it’s a hobby. For many more, it’s an adjunct to whatever hobby they do have. Hobby’s don’t have to save you money; and I’m militantly opposed to monetizing hobbies as a way to “justify” them.

Personally, I’m mostly 3d printing custom components (that I’ve designed), for R/C aircraft of various sorts. (Like, my cyclogyros, or the flying saucer powered by a 3d printed ducted fan; which is, more or less, a scaled model of the saucer from the OG Day The Earth Stood Still. or the thermal airship using toaster wire that has taken on a lot of different forms, ranging from 20’ star destroyers to whale sharks to a robot named Buoyant Bob that hands out candy on Halloween.)

I also enjoy 3d printing as a hobby, in of itself, too. (and spend waaayyyyy too much tinkering on the printer. its fun.) But it doesn’t have to save me money, and I feel no need to compare it to other forms of hobbies. It’s what I enjoy.

edit: lets put this in perspective. This would be like asking a golfer if they found golf worth it. the only real questions are “Do I enjoy it” and “can I afford it”. not “can it save me a buck”.

Depends on how you define “worth it.” Have I spent less money on the printer than I would have buying things I printed? Probably not. However, it has been a blast and great learning experience. Most recently printed landing skids and a camera shroud for a friend’s dji drone which is pretty cool.

Hell yes! I make a lot of things and having this ability really expanded on that.

I should point out that anyone interested in anything more than printing trinkets found on the Internet will also have to learn 3d drafting, at least to some extent. Bear that in mind.

Buying a 3d printer and learning CAD is unlocking a super power. You can put something from your brain into the real world. It’s great for hyper specific parts.

financially worth it?

Probably not.

Did it give me brief respites of light against the clawing, ever encroaching abyssal darkness of life and misery?

Yes.

100%. I’ve printed some cool stuff and some stupid stuff, as well as a bunch of functional parts that have improved my life around my house. More importantly it’s given me a huge creative outlet to get more and more outlandish with my CAD designs and push my experience limits, which is great because that helps me be a lot more efficient at work.

Financially it was a total waste of money but that doesn’t matter when it’s a hobby. A hobby with practical marketable skills, and also the ability to let me prototype some independent ideas I’ve been brewing for a while to maybe sell for some side cash…

Yes. I’ve spent far more money than I will ever save but I’ve had a lot of fun with it.

Also I printed a nerf blaster. Enough said.

I’m on my third upgrade machine after getting my first printer years ago. Very rewarding hobby, much recommend.

I print figurines, busts, and diorama scenery for my son and I to paint. Sure I’ve got my share of functional prints but most my print time is spent so I can spend creative time with my son. So very much worth it for me.

I got an Ender 3v2 and for two years was trying to just get it to work properly, repairing it, and learning about printing. After all of that I’ve enjoyed having an okay printer, but I’m a bit jealous of everyone starting out now that won’t have to deal with all of the garbage I did. And I’m sure people who started years before me felt the same when the Enders came out. If not for those annoyances, yes it’s been worth it.

It’s not like I make or save a lot of money from it, but as a hobby it’s been amazingly fun. Getting into basic 3D modeling has been really cool too, nothing quite hits like making something entirely unique and designed for a specific purpose, then watching your printer just crank it out in a day or two and your imagined thing is all the sudden real.

I’m sure other hobbies can do that too, but for me it was a really awesome feeling :)

Financially? Definitely not

But it’s an enjoyable (and occasionally frustrating) hobby, so I’d say it’s worth it.

Definitely worth it. Sometimes I make little things, like I got a new tool that has a difficult adjustment, but printing a knob made it comfortable to use. I got a new phone last week and couldn’t find a rubberized case I liked, so I designed and printed one this weekend which fits snugly and provides a much better grip. I’ve made cases for other projects, even built a weather station. The biggest project I’ve done is a star tracker (OpenAstroTech) which holds my camera, most recently used during the eclipse in April. Sometimes my printer may sit idle for almost a year, sometimes it prints constantly for several weeks, but it is a very useful tool worthy of a permanent location on my workbench.

I started 14ish years ago in 3D printing; it’s literally my career now. Though, I didn’t buy it…technically. I had recently had a major life experience cause me to reach out to find a way of educating myself - where I found a hackerspace (now they all call themselves makerspaces). They told me all about the RepRap project, and how the idea behind it was 3D printers printing 3D printers.

I was sold. I’ll buy the plastic and we can print it on the sells mendel! No dice. Sells mendel was broke. I was given an opportunity – If I could fix the sells mendel and make it print again, I could use the plastic to print the parts to a Prusa Mendel; Josef Prusa’s first contribution to the RepRap project.

So – I’m a pretty bright guy, I went home, and researched for a week until the next meetup, and eventually built a profile for a program called “Skeinforge” (it’s the slicer we used back then) that would run the Sells Mendel really nicely.

So I printed my PLA parts for the Prusa Mendel, bought a bunch of threaded rod, etc from Home Depot, scavenged old office printers for stepper motors, and had a really nice guy named Dave donate a self-etched RAMPS board that had absolutely no solder mask on it whatsoever. Then I learned Arduino, and initially used Sprinter and Teacup firmware, self-teaching electronics basics along the way. Bought my first print head; a Legitimate J-head from hotends.com (they still sell them!) - and started re-printing my Prusa Mendel in Black/Blue themed ABS; on plain glass painted with ABS slurry. Aleph-Objects modifications of the Prusa!..which was the beginning of Lulzbot! Josef Prusa used to hang out on Freenode IRC as just one of the dudes; and I can’t thank others in the community enough – Triffid_Hunter, Nophead, Whosawhatsis, Prusa, Vik, and others I’ve since forgotten… I got personal help from these guys in a time where information was sparse. They’re my heroes in a way. None of them except Whosawhatsis would probably remember me, but I also helped others down the line. Thomas Sanladerer and I were the primary drivers of the G+ 3D printing community (growing it to over 5k daily active users!), and he went on to do his YouTube channel “Made In Layers”. Gina Haubage was there too, helping people out. If any of you know Loubie (Aria the dragon, etc), we all caused a major stink when her art was being sold on Ebay, and helped a bunch of other creators as well.

Back when I started – everything had to be figured out from scratch. The community was just getting started. Sadly nobody even knows what RepRap is any more. I’m kind of pissed off that East Coast RepRap is renaming itself to “3D Printopia”…just a little slap in the face it feels like.

Now, 3D printers have gotten so good that nobody cares about learning about the machine any longer; they just want plastic crap to come out of it – but it started the path to all of the electromechanical, microcontroller, and programming knowledge I’ve gained. So yeah; absolutely worth it.

The biggest complaint I have about this new second-generation owner of 3D printers, is that they’re all enthusiastic and wanting to help – but most of the shit I see from this group is all bullshit. It’s the same wives-tales that we thought in the beginning, and worked through, and moved past. I see it all resurfacing again.

Like drying PLA for example. I’ve got 5kg roll of some galaxy purple that I bought back when filament didn’t even come on rolls; and I print little things here and there with it – it sits on my garage floor in an open bin, and still prints wonderfully to this day. CHEP - The YouTube channel? He’s an actual fucking scumbag; selling a PCB with a button and a light on it for $25 and pawning it off as some sort of tool to help people “level their enders” – when the real solution is fixing how the machine is built. I repair these things, and dipshits like him are what cause so many to be frustrated and give up. He almost understands it, but he posts things with such confidence, that others follow what he says, and inevitably come to me to fix it. I appreciate that he wants to be helpful, but to truly be helpful you have to be pedantic and succinct in your instructions, and he just isn’t.

I didn’t ultimately get around to completing the two projects that I initially had in mind, and the amount of tweaking and troubleshooting required for basic functionality was pretty substantial.

On the other hand, I did enjoy learning about the state of the technology, even if it wasn’t very productive.

So, as a tool, no. It wasn’t worth it.

As a hobby? Eh, it was okay.