How I rolled into 3D printing

When I was back home in january, my husband bought an Ender 5. Okay ... Another "man thing" I thought. I was not really into the 3D printing thing at that time. But 3 days before I left he explained it to me and showed me how it worked. Yes! I like it. I want my own printer to take with me to the Philippines. The same evening I ordered myself an Ender 3 Pro and 4 spools of filament. The delivery was the next day, so I still had time to takes things out of my luggage and put the printer in it.

And then the adventure started. The first things I've printed I downloaded from www.thinginverse.com. Here you can find a large collection of already made models, ready to print. Most of the items were just decorations. Soon my fridge was full of gecko's :)

Of course I also printed out some figurines from the movie Finding Nemo. As a diver I have to put some of them around in my place.

But to be honest, just downloading a file, slicing it (this means you prepare it so the printer knows how to deal with it) and printing is not really a challenge. So it was time to take the next step. Now I wanted to start designing my own things. I have never used a CAD program before. You need to make a CAD drawing and convert that for 3D printing. I tried using Fusion 360, but that was too hard for me. So I started with Thinkercad. Basicly this is a CAD program for children. Exactly what I needed :) My first steps was to adjust an existing model. I made a banana hanger with a little Minion on top of it. I was quite happy with the result.

The above took more than a day to print. So I was getting a bit impatient and I had several things that took long to print. Meanwhile I couldn't do anything else. Yeah, right ... So after 1 month I ordered a second printer :) Me addicted? No way!
Slowly I understood more about design in Thinkercad and I started to make little tools I could use in daily life.

But then Covid came and everything changed ... But I will tell you that story in my next blog.