3D printing’s a good hobby for me because it’s incremental(as opposed to being expected to know everything before jumping in, like skydiving, golf or tennis. I happen to love playing golf and tennis from being immersed in it since birth), it’s in its infancy, it’s engaging on a lot of levels – engineering, design, mechanically, and filled with DIY solutions to the millions of problems that arise in just one print.
There’s always not just something new to learn even if the science were static, but it’s dynamic, open-sourced, and developed collaboratively and incrementally, there’s a pace-changing and ever-widening conveyor belt of data and information to be gleaned and used.
I’ve been dwelling in this ever-deepening chasm of both online and offline hobbies now and have settled in.
There is a great community behind this movement. Smart, humble, considerate, knowledgeable patient people determined to give what they can to make more of what it is. That will take you far and to crazy places. And there’s a lot of green pasture for everyone.
It’s a good hobby for exactly the group that has adopted it as a worthy cause to expend resources on. Smart, driven, relentless type A’s that generally must finish what they start. As with most introverted type-As, I must admit. A new breed that the internet has spawned.
Here’s something you must learn: (Kind of some rule of thumb) Infill is the inner structure of a 3D printed object. Higher infill percentages result in stronger objects that require more filament and time to print. Decorative objects are printed with a density of 0-15%, standard objects with 15-50%, and robust, functional parts with 50-100% infill density. There are many different patterns for different uses.
Betcha didn’t know that!
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