Resources:

• A fairly good introductory video series about 3D printing on MSDN’s Channel 9. It covers most directly Fused Filament Fabrication (FDM) printers but includes info on others. Good intro to 3D printing  software.
• HP has a good glossary page to help with 3D printing terms (thanks Lyndhurst STEM Club!)
• Thingiverse of course is the big one, worth creating a login so you can keep track of what you’re interested in.
• YouMagine is smaller, but some pretty good model files. It’s the Ultimaker created website, but with their emphasis upon open source you will find files compatible with many different printers.
• MyMiniFactory, which includes both pay and free 3D printer files. Search on “creepers” (like in minecraft) for a pretty cool printable creeper anatomy file set (brainbox also available separately).
• Yeggi is search engine for 3D print files.

For some CAD files that often have the 3D (STL) printer files too (therefore make sure they’ve been optimized for 3D printing correctly):

• GrabCAD has some pretty amazing files, both 3D printer ready & for laser cutters. The nice part is they are in their native file format too.
• 3D Warehouse by Sketchup
• VR, gaming, & people 3D files on Turbosquid (lot of them are pay).
• Autodesk 123D apps have a lot of files in the gallery. Try 123D Design or meshmixer files (but others may work).
• Pinshape seems to growing, should probably move this up higher on the list.
• Cults3D seems to a good collection of pay & free prints. The ‘collections’ they’ve put together are good and there are a lot of high quality designs here.
• CGTrader is another pay & free website which has lots of 3D models.

Our showpiece 3D printer is a Rostock Max V3.2 that we purchased from SeeMeCNC in Goshen, Indiana. It took us around 20 hours to build it & was updated in 2020 with improved stepper motors & a Duet controller. Our original trip to pick it up was covered in this post.

There are 3 other printers at the makerspace currently: a Printrbot Metal Simple and 2 XYZ printers.

We seem to have a lot of 3D printer owners in the area, who get together once a month at our 3DPO Meetup. Check the events page for info on the latest meeting.

We’ve also have a MoonRay S100 and a beta low cost stereolithography (SLA) 3D printer that uses an UV laser and liquid resin that cures into hard or a rubber-like plastic depending on the resin used. The Kickstarter crashed & burned, but there’s still an assembly/testing project if someone wants to take it on.