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Entry level 3d printers are less than $100 now, so it's as cheap as drills and dremels. Compare to the cheapest decent desktop milling machines at $1000+... which also require an order of magnitude more CAD/production engineering knowledge to use.
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for the repair function yeah almost 100% of what I've printed though has been own designs the one time I wanted to print a spare part, couldn't get a cad model from the company (a whiteboard mounting bracket) so I just measured with callipers and made my own design
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Authoring for the masses is unsolved, still. How many of your friends could create and print even a simple bushing? I bet less than 1% of my friends can deal with the clunky, delicate toolchain (tinkercad --> slicer --> printer). Hope I'm ignorant of some simple solution.
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You don't need authoring for the masses... just for like 5%. And modern free CAD tools are really good and intuitive. I could probably teach a non-engineer enough to use OnShape within a couple of hours.
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Autodesk's leading free offering, fusion, is not simple enough to use in 2 hours. I'll try onshape, ever hopeful. It still feels v1: E.g. inner diameters print too small, outer diameters are spot on, no way to compensate. Compared to printing on paper, very delicate and clunky.
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funnily enough, as we speak, I'm printing 4 versions of a small cap for an interference fit part... with different tolerances because my printer is not fine enough that I can control it properly at design level, so trying to figure it out through trial and error :D
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