How do you decide what to print and what sites do you use to find free files? Im having a hard time finding 3d prints and the harder part is picking a file i like.
If I can’t find it for free on Thingiverse, I just make it myself.
My go to is Cults3D, since I print a lot of miniatures.
For functional prints, I almost always whip them up myself in F360.
Yeggi for general search, printables is my go to spot for posting files.
Just use yeggi, the interface is meh but it properly searches everywhere.
I’ve been using thangs which used to do the same, but now it looks only at itself…no thanks
Printables. Thingiverse is dead to me.
Why?
(I’m literally on day one with the printer)
Their website has been janky. They have done stuff that is likely related to poor configurations of the server but appears to be exploitive. Their site hasn't had very good features for search either. Their search results are generally garbage in an authoritarian like attempt to salt your query with unrelated irrelevant garbage to milk ads. When they are unable to serve ads, they have tried to block access in the past. They seem under funded and likely have a mess of unmaintainable spaghetti code because when they make changes other stuff seems to break often. Downloading files from such a place is likely to be a major security risk.
Additionally, all of these file sharing websites are kinda a beginner’s thing. They are only really useful for trinket type sculpted objects. When it comes to functional prints, there is a lot of subtle details required for proper design. You will quickly learn that fasteners, and print tolerances required to replace metal fasteners is very print, material, and printer specific.
I know my exact tolerances in every orientation on my Prusa. When I design, these elements are built into that design. I do not care about calibration. Anyone that obsesses with calibration is doing so in order to transfer designs between machines. If you make your own designs you just need to dial in the tolerance locally. If you really need a 9.95mm part dimension with a 10mm slot in some object, it is extremely easy to do in CAD. Just print a unit test of a slice of the object in question in the same orientation and manually measure all relevant dimensions and tolerances. Let’s say you measure 9.98mm when you dialed it to 9.95mm. Which side needs to be adjusted might be a factor too. All you need to do is go into the CAD and change the dimensions to 9.92mm with the change oriented correctly.
By design these are ultimately precision machines without accuracy. The 0,0 home location is always different, but all motion is relative to this location. Calibration is trying to create transferable accuracy in a precision system. The deeper you get into this, the more it becomes an issue. Tesselated object files are also an extremely poor way of transferring designs because it bakes in the precision versus accuracy bias.
If you are unaware, the issue with files needing tessellation is because of π being infinite and all computers truncating infinite floating point values.
A slightly better solution for small file sharing is to post STEP files. These are the real dimensions with π as generated by the CAD hierarchical tree, but without the full tree. The STEP file can be imported in CAD and further refined through new operations and importing edges from the STEP file. However, if you go down this path, you will likely find that only beginners and extreme amateurs seem to share their designs even at this level of sharing STEP files or even the large CAD files too.
One of the most critical advanced CAD skills is knowing where to place an object’s origin and how to dimension everything relative to critical dimensions. This gets into the topological naming issue of how CAD works under the surface. Basically there are a ton of ways to do CAD wrong. There are many CAD operations that exist for very specific niche case reasons, but are never supposed to be used within the main hierarchical tree. If this is done wrong, it will create multiple stacked references to truncated π and this will break the CAD part every time, especially when making any further modification. I often have this happen at a couple of stages within my own very complicated designs. This is very typical in a CAD design workflow. The solution is to stop and rebuild the entire part from scratch while building the proper order of operations or a better origin for the part. I usually rebuild a part at least once or twice before printing complex stuff and assemblies.
In the past I tried printing stuff from places like thingiverse, but it was fiddly and nothing worked very well. I started importing them into FreeCAD and just rebuilding them with the part as a reference, but even this sucked. My only use for these websites now is for ideas I might integrate into my own designs. I can make anything in CAD properly and faster than I can print the whole thing twice. That is the full learning curve of 3d printer file sharing. It is also why selling files is not really a major business thing that takes off. That would only be possible with accurate machines. Precision is cheap, accuracy is not.
probably because they removed ghost guns.🤷
How do you decide what to print
I find a need for something. I need to attach my shop vac to this tool, so I’ll print an adapter. I need a bracket for this part on my ancient blinds. I’ll print a bracket. I need a case for a circuit board I just bought, I’ll print them.
What sites do you use to find free files?
At this point, Printables, though I don’t do that very often, I tend to model what I need in CAD.
Makerworld and Makeronline. It’s Bambu and Anycubic but they have a lot of files.
I’m always looking for boardgames for my kids.
There are lots of hate on bambu lab cause they are trying to lock the ecosystem on their platform. A few people that are way smarter than me came out, like Jeff Geerling and maker muse, to respond to bambu lab’s update of no offline mode, I think. After the hate they backtrack. I don’t know if bambulab is still trying but they will get the hate from the maker/tinkerer if they try to prevent them to tinker on their paid printer.
But using Makerworld without buying their printer or uploading models is hurting Bambu. So downvoters must be Bambu fans.
And Anycubic isn’t locked down like Bambu. It supports Orca and you can put Klipper on it.
None of the sites are completely free from enshittification, but printables seems the least bad. Prusa has a better track record with supporting an open community, at least for now. Bambu+makerworld is an example of a company trying to close as much as possible to lock people in. Now I can’t download without a login? No thanks.
If you can’t find the right model free look at cults,.it’s been a source of amazing prints and many are cheap
Printables and Thingiverse typically. Sketchfab is great for 3D scans of real objects.
Anything in particular you are looking for?
I always start with printables and then branch out to cults as needed.
McMaster Carr for small parts.
I believe i mostly like little hand tools or anything that could be useful. Im pretty new to the world of 3d printing i would say.
Consider starting with organizational aids. 3d printing is great for things that hold other things. Start with simple modifications like resizing models to fit your needs and branch out to more complex customizations and cad building from there.
Most site (not stl search site) have “collection” or “tags”, when you find something you like, check if it under some collection/tag.
Exemple: https://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=Hand+tool&page=1&type=collections
Printables and sometimes thingyverse. Cult and yeggi to get in the right direction
Thangs aggregates other sites, or so I’ve been told.
They originally showed items hosted anywhere and free first, but once people got used to it they changed all the defaults. If you go there now and search, you have to manually set the source or it only shows you results from thangs itself, and pushes paid models and memberships to the top.
I only use it as a last resort now, and it’s typically pretty bad.
Now that it’s a thing, I always try checking the public Manyfold instance first! Do those federate here yet? Prolly something like @q8vfvg1f7m3k@3dprint.social ?
I’ve been using thangs which used search everywhere, but now it defaults to searching only models hosted on itself so I’ve stopped using it.
