Inspiration

I’ve been interested in 3D printing since I first tried it in school, where we designed a pencil holder — which the school still owes me, by the way. I finally decided to get my own printer, partly for personal projects and partly to prepare farewell gifts for the end of my internship. After researching the options and asking around, I settled on a Bambu P1S with an AMS 2 Pro, having already used Bambu printers before and being impressed by their reputation.

What I did

I got the printer set up and printing within about 15 minutes, including a calibration Benchy with no issues. From there, I printed a range of items, from practical things like a shoe rack and laptop holder to a ship model and several farewell gifts. Along the way, I ran into some of the realities of 3D printing, including filament becoming brittle due to humidity and nozzle issues that eventually required me to change the nozzle. I also learnt to think more carefully about print orientation to reduce support usage. For example, I faced a button downwards on a multi-colour switcher so that it did not need to build a tall support tower.

What I’m proud of

The printer worked almost immediately out of the box, which was much smoother than I expected. More importantly, the prints made good gifts, and the recipients were genuinely happy with them. One of the more memorable prints was an articulated chameleon. For the two most important recipients, I used AI to create figures of them as statues and then 3D printed them. They were surprised by the result and described the gifts as particularly unique.

What can be further improved

I underestimated both the time required to print everything and the quantity I needed. I also found that scheduling batches efficiently could make a significant difference. For example, an overnight batch might finish at 9am even though I leave for work at 6am, leaving the printer idle until I return at 6pm. If I instead adjusted the batch to finish around 5am, even with fewer pieces, I could start another batch before leaving and keep the printer running throughout the day. This made me realise that with batch printing, optimising the schedule can be just as important as optimising the individual print.