I really fucking hate mod developers

Or the better title: “Random internet creature complains about hobbyists”

The accessibility of FDM 3D printing is a great thing, it means anyone can just print “useful” items without having to pay outrageous amounts of money to some print house. It also means a lot of what I'm going to call “CNC & Friends” (CNC, laser engraving, wood burning, etc) have become more accessible. You can take the cheapest 3D printer on the market and turn it into a eye and fire safety hazard for really nothing.

This large influx of cheap hardware means learning the trade is easier to do, meaning someone like myself, who starts having cold sweats when blender is mentioned, can just shit out a basic spacer or useful item for my wife within a few hours.

I'm not going to claim that I'm the best at everything, I fuck up constantly with everything. I'd be rich if fucking up was a job.

That being said, it seems that learning from said fuck-ups is not a universal thing. Nor is really any kind of research before said fuck-up happens.

People who don't know anything about the trade will strive for perfect and their sense of perfect is zero clearance. This fundamental issue is probably the most irritating to me. It's a tie with people who upload STL files and never the STEP or TinkerCAD link, editing a mesh is a fucking pain and fuck you if you don't share that source file.

Clearances, oh god please think about the clearances!

No one thinks about the clearances and in return I have to either:

Your 3D printer is not perfect no matter how much it costs nor how much work you put into it.

It's just not.

FDM printing, or fused deposition modeling, is basically just laying a bit of hot plastic on some predetermined path. People see that and go “Oh that's neat, lemme do it again but with this model instead” but theres a lot going on under the hood and dealing thermoplastic polymers on top of that is just bound to cause issues. As much as Bamboo Labs or Creality want to sell the idea of “Plug and Play”, it's not.

These desktops machines are not built for repeatability, they are built down to a price. Even the plastics you use with them are “luck of the draw” depending on what printer you have.

You could have the best fucking printer out there with thousands of hours put into calibrating and prep and still have bed adhesion issues or warping, it's just the nature of the game.

For example, in my time with my Ender 3 V2, I learned:

And I only now learned that most of the issues I was having with first layer adhesion was the brand of plastic I was using. That took two fucking years to learn.

I have come to learn that my printer, while fun, is a fucking pain to use correctly. I spent more time attempting to fix some issue with it than I did learning the tooling or creating something useful.

That being said, I don't regret it. In it's current state with Marlin2 and a older Ender 3 control board, it's a pretty solid work horse. Still peeved that the Ender 3 V3 SE comes with auto bed leveling, direct extruder, and auto z offset for far less than what I paid for the 3V2 (fucking ow).

It works, I guess.

But what this wall of text is suppose to showcase is, FDM 3D printing is not “Plug and Play”, in fact it's very much like getting a new pet. Yeah it's fun for the first few weeks but now you have to clean up shit and feed it. It's fucking annoying sometimes.

So, why do I really fucking hate mod developers and how does this even play into 3D printing?

Well, kind reader (or shit bot), it is because I do :3

But really, it's because the kind of people that would buy a 3D printer, then design their own models to release either for money or free, are the same kind of people that are more likely to make a minecraft mod or something similar.

That is to say, there's a shit-ton of people out there who don't really know what their are doing but whatever it is it's working (to an extent).

This is everyone's “feet wet” moment with the maker field as a whole, it's fun to be in that mindset.

I feel like an old woman bitching about the kids in my lawn but really, I just want well thought out designs. If I have to sand the part after printing, that's fine, but it better not be because you, the model creator, thought that having zero space for clearance was OK.

Print the same part twice and measure the difference. Attempt to put the two parts together, do they snap together or do they get stuck and become useless?

Make sure that you at least add a few mms of clearance to tight fitting parts because trust me, not everyone that is going to be printing your model will have their printer dialed into +-0.01mm of accuracy.

Just give us some space.