In 2013, I got my first taste of 3D printing through a hackerspace I was a member of. Some of the members were already building their own printers, and that curiosity quickly rubbed off on me. My very first printer was a delta printer, a Kossel-style model — and honestly, it never really worked well. Still, the fascination stuck: being able to make something out of nothing (well, plastic) fits perfectly with the tinkering mentality of a hackerspace.
After that it went quiet for a while, until I picked it back up in 2021 with an Ender 5 Pro. I used that printer actively for years and modded it quite a bit: I replaced the original extruder with a direct extruder, and control ran through my own OctoPrint server instead of directly from the printer itself.
When a Bambu Lab printer eventually joined the lineup, the Ender 5 Pro went to a colleague, who still uses it today. The biggest success with the Bambu Lab so far is a jumbo dragon a whopping 1.6 meters long. A size like that obviously never fits on the print bed in one piece, so the dragon was split entirely into separate, printable parts and glued back together afterward into one whole. Going from “this thing can’t even print a decent cube” to a print a meter and a half long — that’s quite a bit of progress.
These days, the use is a mix. A lot of functional prints for around the house — hooks, holders, that kind of thing. But just as often it’s simply about fun: fidget toys, silly keychains to give away, things that aren’t “needed” for anything but are fun to make. Designing my own stuff isn’t my strongest skill yet — I’m only now getting seriously into it, and I hope to get genuinely good at it over time. I even track the filament itself in my own homelab these days — so this hobby has become just another part of the rest.
What once started as “let’s see what that weird machine in the hackerspace actually does” eventually turned into a permanent fixture at home. Not every experiment works out — that first delta printer is proof of that — but that’s probably exactly the charm of it.
