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#don#printer#own#more#things#printers#years#community#lathe#still
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Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Not a surprise to me though since I am operating in the CNC industry I have seen the same struggles and changes, albeit, from a slightly different perspective.
I work with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. It seems, from my observation, that most people are not working with hardware like they were a few years ago. The "homebrew" machines and shadetree makers are becoming few and far between.
The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects. Not only that but people have been convinced that they don't have the ability to make a machine.
Instead of spending time learning something new/valuable (i.e. Reprap) it is now popular to just have someone else do it...be it AI or a factory in another country with subsidies that create massive differences in bottom line.
The ability to make things at home is disappearing. People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines. Companies that make machines that care about their community and customers are disappearing.
Maybe it's by design? I don't know.
I've seen what people go through when they operate 3D printers. The impression I have is that they still make 2D inkjet printers look like paragons of reliability.
It’s stuck in the auto calibration stage. It gets halfway through then it stops with a generic error message. The UI around this is really clunky. I’ve tried searching online, asking Claude and nothing. I emailed customer support and they came back with cryptic instructions that assume familiarity with the internals of the machine.
I decided to leave this for a day when I wasn’t too mentally drained from work to debug issues in my free time and instead the machine has been collecting dust ever since.
Maybe it was a mistake to get a Bambi Lab? I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience.
There is another set of people who are in 3D printing because they like the experience of debugging and improving the printer as much or more than the final prints they get from it. The most hardcore 3D printing people I know don’t actually print much other than 3D benchies and test towers because their fun comes from playing with the machine and trying new parts. Those people build a different set of printer types than the plug and play units used by most casual makers.
There was way more valuable things learned in the process than just making Benchy.
For years I have been trying to tell people this. The value of Reprap was not just "to have a printer".
[1] https://www.robosprout.com/thank-you-reprap-for-all-of-it/
For people who genuinely wanted the experience of exploring 3D printers, like yourself, I'm very happy that those people got that experience.
For myself, just as I want to print documents and not have adventures with inkjet printers, I want to make things and not have adventures with 3D printers. Which is why I have no plans to own a 3D printer.
They’re a pain in the ass if you buy bottom of the barrel crap with sloppy tolerances for $100 I guess, but the same is true of regular printers.
> The ability to make things at home is disappearing
I do not know what you are talking about.
3D printing at home is more popular than ever. Even families I know who don’t have a computer at home, only their phones, now have 3D printers and use them.
> People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines
I think this is an appeal to 3D printing purity that drove me away from many of the communities. In the early days we all swapped tips and shared reviews of parts (like the Smoothieboard I still have) with other people who liked to build machines because that was the only way to do 3D printing at hobby level prices. When asked what we used the 3D printers for, the joke was that they were used to print parts for our 3D printer. It wasn’t really a joke, though. We spent more time keeping the printers working and trying to tune them than we did printing other things we needed.
That has flipped. Now it’s easy to get a cheap 3D printer and start getting parts out of it without thinking about the printer much. This is great if you’re a person who wants to use the output of the printer. This is boring if you think the value is the process of building and changing the printer hardware all the time.
I’m tired of hearing takes about how this is wrong or bad. Most “makers” want to make other things, not spend their precious free time trying to debug failing prints. There are more opportunities and knowledge available now for people who do want to build their own machines and it’s very cheap. People who want to do that can, but don’t look down upon the people who don’t want to do that.
"it is now popular to just have someone else do it...be it AI or a factory in another country"
And sure there are some people interested in reprap but they have been scattered to the wind. #reprap IRC has become an advertising/support channel for commercial printers. If you go to most of the channels/forums where the development used to happen and mention you want to build a printer you will be flooded with responses about how stupid that is and provided with names/links of the printers you should be buying. Making things is a fool's errand.
Maybe my observations were different...maybe not...but from what I saw at about 2016 the whole DIY machine thing switched.
If, however, you want to learn how to build one, or just have an experience of building your own tool you'll use to create stuff, it is most definitely not stupid to do it.
With 3D printing becoming mainstream, you'll have fewer people in those communities who support and live that approach though, and you'll need to look harder to find documentation and like-minded people.
Also, long before mail-order offshore manufacturing, people have been lured away from most of this by the promise of 3D printing. Every other techie I know owns a 3D printer. Most have not made anything interesting with it because they soon learn that the real difficulty is materials science and 3D design. But as a nerd, it's the thing you're supposed to own. In contrast, I know maybe four people in the SF Bay Area who are into woodworking, metalsmithing, CNC, or stuff like that.
I don't see mail-order prototyping as a conspiracy... it's more of a culmination of the DIY community chasing the mirage they were sold on in the early 2010s. I still remember the HN claims: home manufacturing revolution! It's the beginning of a brand new economy, why would anyone buy anything anymore when you can just click "print"... with some amusing parallels to how some folks now talk about building your own software with AI.
The mail-order stuff isn't evil insofar that it may allow some people to make things they couldn't make before. On the flip side, it's a very inefficient way to learn, so I think it will reduce hardware literacy among those who could afford a garage workshop.
FWIW, I think the same goes for AI-assisted hardware design. On one hand, I see people who otherwise wouldn't be DIYing getting into DIY: "I asked Claude and it one-shotted this rectangular enclosure for me, it's amazing!", "Claude made this RP2350 breakout board for me, how cool is that". But I also see established DIYers getting a degree of brain rot.
I miss absolutely nothing about etching my own single layer PCBs at home
Second, I don't think there's a revolution for the general population. Your archetypal middle-aged dad / curious teenager are DIYing less than 20 years ago, which in turn was less than 40 years ago. The stats here are clear, most of "garage" occupations are on the decline. Less space, higher costs, more emphasis on safety. Some hobbies, such as backyard chemistry, are effectively gone. Shop classes in most schools are gone. Making your own bookshelf or building a radio from a kit is no longer a rite of passage.
Third, the "explosion of niche products" - maybe, but I think some of it is just visibility. Kickstarter, HN, Hack-a-Day, and so on. Before that, we had hobby journals for woodworking, electronics, etc, and they were always full of ads for niche gear. You just weren't seeing the totality of it in a doom-scroll loop. Visibility has benefits, but my point is that the qualitative change isn't as profound.
It comes down to the fact that these things are tools. Now that reasonably affordable "turnkey" or "off the shelf" options are available, what you're really seeing is the divide between those wanting building the tool itself as their hobby, and those that just want a tool to use on their other hobbies. There was less of a divide previously because for most people, the "just buy one" option simply didn't exist. Now it does.
I spent a lot of time over the years wire-wrapping circuits, then manually laying out and etching/making circuit boards, then using software to do the layouts while still etching/drilling boards myself, then learning and switching the bulk of my projects to surface-mount. It was a necessary part of making electronic bits for stuff I wanted, but I didn't enjoy that part. Now that I can draw something up, send it off and for a few bucks have professionally manufactured multi-layer boards in days/weeks, with many/most components already placed and soldered, why wouldn't I cut out the part I don't enjoy?
I played with 3d printers off and on from about 2006 onwards, though I never kept one around for any real length of time. I found that while I really wanted the capabilities, I didn't want "building and keeping a 3d printer running" to be my hobby. 20 years later, there are options that don't require printer maintenance to be it's own hobby, and I'm much more willing to keep one around.
I've had a couple Chinese-made mini-mills since 2002 -- Sieg X2s, if I remember the old naming scheme correctly, though they were sold by various importers with their own names/model numbers. I converted one to CNC operation in 2004. While I appreciate the work done by others that I could learn from, I did not enjoy the process or the project. If there had been a reasonably affordable "turnkey" option with the capabilities I wanted, I would have 100% taken it. If I needed another one now, with the options available, there's no way I'd bother to build my own. Even then, I would have gone with sherline's early cnc offerings -- they fit my budget, but were just too small for what I wanted to do.
My first CNC router was scratch-built in the early 2000s. My current one came in a crate 4 years ago, and cost about half of what building a new one with the same capabilities from scratch would have. Instead of spending a several months' worth of weekends building it, I spent one weekend unpacking it and setting it up, another fine-tuning it and the software settings, and then was able to start using it for projects I enjoyed.
The ability for people to make things at home is expanding, just not in the way you'd like to see. That isn't a bad thing.
At the end of the day, time is what is ultimately valuable, and I don't have nearly as much of it as I did when I was younger. At this point, I'd much rather spend what time I do have enjoying my hobbies and creating the things I want to create, not building tools or suffering through tasks I hate simply because someone else thinks that is the important part. It seems I'm not the only one.
As for companies that "care" disappearing, well, that's just the current business environment. When the only measure of success that's deemed important is the stock value -- or potential stock value, in the case of startups -- customer service is an expense that can be cut to inflate next months' quarterly report. In exchange, the concept of customer loyalty is dying as well.
Ever since I started living on my own I've lived in apartments, none of which had a backyard (one of them had a parking lot). None of my friends owns a house either. I'm the perfect customer for this and I'd love to do my own projects (two of which require a lathe!) but I simply don't have the space.
Is this just me? Or is the disappearance of the hobby garage a real phenomenon? A 3D printer is fairly limited in what it allows, but it also doesn't throw sawdust in the center of my living room.
One reason why I bought sherline is the company was still in business and creating so many accessories.
I guess I'll be trying to buy stuff off of eBay or something like I would have been doing had I bought Chinese stuff.
Speaking of which does anyone know the details of their small 60 degree carbide inserts? I assume that don't make those themselves.
Can’t help but wonder if “operating costs” include tariffs and other policy decisions by the current administration that have driven up costs for everyone.
It is not just tariffs. The cost of living in the US, especially housing, has approximately doubled in my area since 2019. There is a massive overinvestment in real estate. When housing costs go up it forces companies to pay their employees more to adjust which then drives up the COGS. This becomes a feedback loop because the real estate investors see the prices go up and say "well we have to raise rents because COGS are going up."
Competing with any offshore becomes impossible (especially when compared to countries which subsidize their production). Companies close instead of attempting to compete. Why would you when simply investing in real estate, crypto or AI would net more money? The parts needed to produce in the US are typically not made in the US.
Tariffs hurt...a lot...the companies I work with directly (including mine) have been struggling with them for a decade now. But it is a lot more than that...there is a general lack of interest in making things that are real. Plus, the cost if you attempt to do so puts you in a position where you cannot be competitive.
The cost of living, also, needs a reframe. The real truth there is that most people, who live paycheck to paycheck, are half as prosperous as they were a couple of years ago. Think about that. The Majority of an entire country became twice as poor practically overnight. It’s not cost of living rising , it’s standard of living being halved for most Americans. It’s not a small thing, and it will have reprocussions for decades. A population on strong retrograde prosperity does not innovate, does not invent, does not plan for the future. It’s basically terminal cancer.
No doubt innovation will rise once the ashes cool, but that’s more like what we are seeing in Eastern Europe, admirable and significant, but no equivalence whatsoever to the economic juggernaut that the USA once was. (And still is, for now)
Maybe automation will turn that around, but who then is the beneficiary of a fleet of millions (billions?) of corporate owned general purpose humanoid robots? That’s a big part of what my startup is working on ; making that phase generally useful to regular people, not just corporate giants.
I earned an MSME without ever learning to actually make things, so once I could afford it I bought a Sherline CNC mill and taught myself to use it. I made many mistakes but got there. I used it just last week to make a wind gauge mounting bracket for a 70 year old sailboat.
I liked that it was made in the USA and (at the time, pre mainstream internet) had a great community to learn from.
I know there are other options still, but Sherline has a fond place in my heart for how easy they made it to get started.
If you are a builder, there is no sane way to bid on contracts with such hugely variable COGS.
And how the HELL do you even attempt to fix the US housing supply if you are tariffing Canadian lumber? You can't.
Is there a free alternative to this ideally community owned and open source?
They make mills and lathes. They are really nice little machines, great for hobby use. We have one lathe from them in our hackspace for example, and it is a delight. Of course you have to understand the limitations of the tool, but that is true for every machine.
That being said, it is just a lathe. There is nothing particularly complicated about it. At least not at their complexity level. If you can manufacture machine tools you can make one very easily. If you don't have the manufacturing capability you won't.
The reason i'm saying this is because "free as in freedom" and "open source" are properties of plans / source code. If you happen to have a lathe factory, the lack of a lathe plan is not going to stop you. You are just going to design one for yourself. And if you don't have a factory which can make a lathe, then why do you care about plans for a lathe being open source?
I guess the factory itself could be "community owned". If you have a business plan, or a large pile of cash, now is the time to approach them that you want to buy everything from them. But I'm not sure how "community owned" would even work for this use case.
Basically what I'm saying this is hardware, not software. The terms you use don't make much sense in this case.
I spent overly long trying to learn on sherline tools and once I gave up and bought a Bridgeport and an old Logan, I realized that I was just banging my head against the limitations of the tools.
the value they had was that they were cheaper than the smaller version of the standard toolroom machines, and they were a way to bootstrap yourself without having the heavy power and the floorspace. so pretty much the storefront, not the IP. I still have their 4" rotary, and its actually not bad. the mill had a huge amount of flex in the column that made it pretty unusable for me unless you took really really tiny passes.
I had an old Unimat for a couple years, and while that was even _more_ dodgy than the sherline the fact that it was all steel and a combined mill/lathe made it a lot more interesting. would rather see some community standards for tooling on a platform like that. maybe a 50% larger so setup isn't so fiddly.