3D Printing

From some of the posts here and on L3-G0's blog and YouTube, you can tell that I've been doing some stuff with 3D Printers.  Especially for the droids I "need" funny angled bricks and the like that reinforce the Lego models.  They can be built from pure Lego, but once you start bouncing them down a rough sidewalk, they fall to pieces, and the hinges get confused and stuff - so most of the droids have printed bricks.

(printed bricks seen @ 21 seconds in the video)

I've been exposed to some of the 3D printers available at a "maker garage" and have friends that have built various models, but I pretty much thought of all FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) printers using filament as being about the same. They all have things to move the head &/or platform and an extruder to squeeze out a long string of hot plastic to build up the models in layers.

To that effect, I'd bought a Flashforge Creator (the wood one) as my first printer, and I've been pretty happy with it. The other various printers at work sometimes seem a little cleaner in some cases, or worse in other cases. They all have issues with the extruder getting clogged occasionally, and they all need a little bit of hands on maintenance.

I pretty much expected to keep using the Flashforge (indeed, I bought another used one and fixed it up), however I've been lured into trying a Creality CR-10 and have been pretty pleased so far.