The past…
Some of you who know me are aware that I was running a very small business called SparkRC for a couple of years, where I was designing and printing tool holders, parts trays, and other tools and organisers for my other hobby, RC Racing.
This was great fun but was more work than the return I was getting. A lot of 3D printing involves the design of custom parts, with the actual print taking only a matter of hours. Because the parts are 3D printed and I was selling in such small quantities, it was hard to charge a price that covered the design time, the test prints during prototyping, and then the filament and print time for the actual prints. Add in packaging and postage, and basically, I was doing it for fun rather than profit. This may not sound great, but with 3D printing, if you find the right prints and sell in the right numbers, it can be very lucrative, as the actual filament and print costs are really quite small, so making money does work.
At the peak of my printing, I had about seven printers of varying levels, including a number of Bambu Labs P1S four-colour printers. I have now sold pretty much everything and, at present, I have two Prusa printers, a Mini+ and an MK3.5S. I am enjoying designing and printing things for myself and friends, without the pressure of orders or making a profit.
Where to now…
I sat down a few weeks ago and thought about what I would like to do now, as I still enjoy 3D printing, and came up with a few takeaways and ideas.
I have a lot of experience with 3D printers, having built my original Anet A8 printer from components a fair number of years ago, through many of the more modern printers, including building my own Prusa printers from kits and running the modern Bambu Labs multi-colour printers.
I have used a number of 3D design packages, including Solidworks, Fusion 360, and FreeCAD, so I can pull together designs.
The first idea was this site, bringing together my two hobbies of RC Racing and 3D Printing. Next is doing some tutorials on designing some 3D parts for RC and taking you through how that is done (I will use FreeCAD/Fusion 360 as these are, to different levels, free to use, so you can follow along). I will make the files available for free in design format and STL format, ready to be printed. And lastly, for now, I am thinking about doing some YouTube videos where I buy a lower-end, but still very capable, 3D printer and go through the steps from taking it out of the box, getting it up and running, and then linking in with my design tutorials to design and ultimately print something on the printer.
If there is anything you would like to see, please use the contact page here on the site to let me know or ask any questions, and I will try my best to answer.
