When you want to do something new, don’t wait for the stars to align to do it. You should simply do it, and if the need for improvement arise, then upgrade or improve. Tom and Tracy Hazzard talk about the 3D print experience – why you need to start using 3D printing and practicing your skills and not be afraid to try new designs. Tech for 3D printing constant changes, but you do not have keep up with this demand for the newest printer. Tom and Tracy encourage you to appreciate the machine that you have while ensuring that you are producing quality output. There is so much free software out there, such as Simplifiy3D, that can guide you through excellent 3D designs.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Just Do It – 3D Print Experience

Trying and doing to learn 3D printing is better than listening and watching, sometimes you need to just do it. Take that first step and dive into 3D printing, you can figure it out as you go along. If you are endlessly waiting for next months newer/better/faster 3D printer to come out, you will always be waiting because the technology will continue to improve. Refine your skills now and upgrade as needed – you might not even need the faster print speed.

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We are going to talk about 3D print experience, in stealing the line from Nike, which is “Just Do It.” Trying and doing is better than watching and listening to what others are doing. When people are extremely analytical and an engineering type or they’ve got a high IQ, you get into analysis and constant analysis, and then paralysis from that. You don’t make the decision. There is just so much accessibility to low cost 3D printers and to free software, that anyone can have a 3D print experience. Just try it. If you hate it and it is not working out, at least you have a starting point from where you go next. Now you can search for something that is difficult. If you can’t find it then 3D printing is not for you, which I doubt.

If you are doing and trying something, you have a better frame of reference from which you are looking for. I just met some people who are still doing the same thing in one of the conferences that we went to. They are still working on getting their project off the ground. I am more action oriented than your average person, but there was so much that they could have been doing to find out answers. They are missing the boat and timing as well as the opportunity of timing. This is a classic thing that goes back to the 90s when personal computers were the big thing. Inkjet printers were still very new. The chips that ran these PC printers were increasing in speed very quickly.

Their speeds were doubling every 3 to 6 months. I remember some co-workers of mine where they wanted to buy a new computer. They read that there are some of them with a new feature coming next month. If you wait always for the best feature, you will wait forever and you will never buy one. There is faster and quicker next month, but I least I am using a personal computer now. The same is with 3D printers – just do it.

WTFFF 296 | Just Do It - 3D Print Experience

At some point you need to just do it in 3D printing. We started with a one color printer but finally were able to test out a dual color printer.

You don’t know what you don’t know till you dive in and start to just do it and try it out You may not even need that faster screaming printer or speed. Maybe, your “what” and what you are designing needs you to have a slower printer that is more accurate. You won’t know that until you dive in and start trying. The reality is that you need to get more mature in what you are looking for. I started with the Makerbot 3D printer and I find it to be slow. We tried others. Yes they were faster, but we sacrificed lots of quality. They could not end up doing what I wanted to print at the end of the day. I still hunger for multiple colors and that is not going to go away. With the Dutch Builder printer, it is a good example.

I started to appreciate the quality of the Makerbot and even though it wasn’t as fast, it did not matter. The quality is what mattered over everything else. Simplifiy3D is also one of the things that I like as slicing software. I would not understand that if I did not just do it and try it. Right now, there is no excuse because as we have pointed out out in multiple software reviews of ours, there is so much free software out there. There is so much out there for you to be trying to 3D design. If you do not start there, then you are going to get a printer that you won’t be able to run all the time everywhere. Try it out and make some things. If you do not want to just do it and dive in, then go use an agency or a 3D Hub. There is no reason not to. Try it out and see what it is like.

There are those that are in urban areas with local workshops where they have 3D printers and they have different kinds. They do not have the exact one when you buy your own, but they got printers for you to use. Vocademy is like a school of sorts. They are a whole complete after school learning center. I think it is logical here for them to bring one here. I thought of them because they are the epitome of just doing it. They are all about making, doing, jumping in, experiencing it, and bringing it to our youth. There are schools that they are going to with 3D printing, but they do not have a comprehensive in industrial arts teaching program as they used to. Vocademy is all about everything and not just 3D printing – woodworking, textiles, 3D printing.

They are filling in the need which is gone from lots of schools. 3D printing is bringing some of that industrial arts education back in the schools. Schools can do so much, and you got to do it yourself. Seek extracurricular activities and programs that you pay for in order to educate our kids the way that we were educated when we still had those programs in the 80’s.

Proving it Out

On the subject of just do it, that is really where we are at right now in this podcast. We are sitting back and now we have done everything that we have done with the podcast. We proved that you guys listen out there. You have questions and we can find you answers, as well as having access to great people where we have guests that come on. In the next couple of months, we have bigger and better guests coming up. Is it time for us to do something in the business side of 3D printing? We haven’t just dived in to do it yet.

Sometimes when you just do it and dive into 3D printing, you need to scrape it off the build plate and try again. The whole point of failing is learning.

It is getting to be time and I certainly want to do it, but there are a lot of things to consider. It is a complicated subject. The whole point of failure is learning. That is what 3D printing is about. It is about scraping it off the build plate and starting it on again. Can we do something that we don’t fail spectacularly? We want it to do inexpensively and fail fast. There is tremendous opportunity. We built this podcast in a way that it dive in to the industry in a sense, as it figures out what we want to do in a larger sense in this industry.

We have been getting a lot of requests and we have not found any solutions for it. I am going to throw this out there and hopefully you guys let us know what you think. We have been getting a lot of requests for workshop type classes where we can teach product design through 3D printing. In other words, teaching how to design a product in the design side of 3D printing is what we want to do. It is not just to build or slice something. That is a tall task, but if we have enough interest, it is something that we can tackle. I will enjoy doing it. It is a complicated subject to take on, but maybe we need to just do it.

People go to school and college for 4 years to learn how to design properly. It is much about the designing itself. It is more about the thought process behind design. The activity set makes you explore that. In a workshop sense that is highly possible. I think it can’t be a one day, but maybe a two day or three day workshop in which we do that. The third day will be 3D printing it. If we did something like that, would we have people who are interested in trying out and doing it? We have 25 years of product design experience. We have 100,000 hours of working on it combined in the two of us. It is interesting to combine and understand on how we approach design and how we approach 3D printing.

In 3 days, we could not teach CAD which is why there is some prerequisite that you know how to dial in and do some things in CAD at least. Or advanced enough where you are beyond 123D. You should be using it very well in your laptop. We don’t want to get into the fine points of tangents and how to make something in the CAD program. We want to focus on the aspect of designing and the product itself that you want to do.

What if we did a monthly project? If anyone would be interested in that, we would love to hear about that. If you got some ideas, we would also like to hear about that. Let’s start having a dialogue about this. If it is something of interest, then we can make something happen. It would be a lot of fun. I guess that is going to wrap it up for today. Just do it. That was a fun conversation. Just do it in some way, including us. Let’s do it.

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Just Do It – 3D Print Experience

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