Why every engineer needs a 3D printer.

While I suspect most mechanical engineers have considered buying their own 3D printer, there are far too many to choose from. It took me a while to break down and buy a 3D printer, because the range of prices were quite large. I initially found that there were quite a few reasonably reviewed units that fell around the $500 price, but there were always just enough negative reviews to convince me not to purchase. In the end, I took a chance and jumped at a Sindoh 3DWOX DP200 system that had surprisingly high positive reviews. I initially assumed that the reviews must be a series of employees, so I continued to watch the reviews grow over several months. I finally convinced myself that they were real and spent the extra money, about $1200, to give it a chance. While it uses specialized cartridges and exclusively uses Sindoh’s filament, this unit worked as close to a commercial printer as one could expect. I was printing within an hour and was very impressed with the results. I’ve now used it for a variety of home projects and have now found a niche use for it in my work. In particular, it has been very useful for PCB assembly fixtures for positioning heatsinks and specialty components like FET’s. An even better application is for making forming tools for small etched or laser cut parts. Currently, getting these flat parts is fast and very cost effective, but if you are looking to have them formed into particular shapes it gets very expensive and time consuming. Very simple formed shapes can cost between $2,500-$5,000 dollars for specialty bend tools, which is costly and often slows up the development process. It recently occurred to me that 3D printers can provide a very simple and cost effective way of building form tools for prototype quantities while avoiding the delay and added costs associated with custom hard tooling. While the designs are still several hours of work, the production of the parts now takes a matter of hours and $5-10 dollars worth of material. For this reason, I would highly suggest spending the extra money for a better unit. In the end, I’m quite happy that I spent the extra money and while I was initially happy just printing Groot figures and spinners for my friends, using it for work is the icing on the cake.