Comment by Ccecil
8 hours ago
Sad news. First, Openbuilds now this.
Not a surprise to me though since I am operating in the CNC industry I have seen the same struggles and changes, albeit, from a slightly different perspective.
I work with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. It seems, from my observation, that most people are not working with hardware like they were a few years ago. The "homebrew" machines and shadetree makers are becoming few and far between.
The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects. Not only that but people have been convinced that they don't have the ability to make a machine.
Instead of spending time learning something new/valuable (i.e. Reprap) it is now popular to just have someone else do it...be it AI or a factory in another country with subsidies that create massive differences in bottom line.
The ability to make things at home is disappearing. People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines. Companies that make machines that care about their community and customers are disappearing.
Maybe it's by design? I don't know.
I think maybe your view is too narrow? It's not that people don't want to make a machine, it's that now they don't have to.
When I started hobby CNC a few years ago, the only compact or desktop CNC machines were flimsy Chinese things made entirely of extrusion, expensive machines made for education/prototyping environments and the Carbide3D Nomad (which I ended up buying).
I ended up building a machine from scratch because the original Nomad was too flimsy to really cut metals, even Aluminium.
But in the last few years companies like Makera came along and sell desktop CNC machines that can cut metal for under $6k USD and there's even a toolchanger.
For just a little more, there's a Kickstarter for a 5-axis machine with mist cooling, ATC a wireless probe and it can cut steel and titanium.
And for those that want a DIY project, there seem to be plenty of folks doing CNC conversions of second-hand manual mills.
Funny you mention Makera.
They use a fork of Smoothieware. [1]
We were happy/surprised to see they shared their mods. It is rare.
[1]https://github.com/MakeraInc/CarveraFirmware
> The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects.
> The ability to make things at home is disappearing
I do not know what you are talking about.
3D printing at home is more popular than ever. Even families I know who don’t have a computer at home, only their phones, now have 3D printers and use them.
> People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines
I think this is an appeal to 3D printing purity that drove me away from many of the communities. In the early days we all swapped tips and shared reviews of parts (like the Smoothieboard I still have) with other people who liked to build machines because that was the only way to do 3D printing at hobby level prices. When asked what we used the 3D printers for, the joke was that they were used to print parts for our 3D printer. It wasn’t really a joke, though. We spent more time keeping the printers working and trying to tune them than we did printing other things we needed.
That has flipped. Now it’s easy to get a cheap 3D printer and start getting parts out of it without thinking about the printer much. This is great if you’re a person who wants to use the output of the printer. This is boring if you think the value is the process of building and changing the printer hardware all the time.
I’m tired of hearing takes about how this is wrong or bad. Most “makers” want to make other things, not spend their precious free time trying to debug failing prints. There are more opportunities and knowledge available now for people who do want to build their own machines and it’s very cheap. People who want to do that can, but don’t look down upon the people who don’t want to do that.
It's a lot less of an issue, now, but Linux used to be a "mechanic's hot rod" operating system.
It's like that kid down the block, with the sweet hot rod that rattles the windows, when he drives past, but whenever you drive past his house, the car is up on blocks, and he's working on it.
Working on tools can be a lot of fun, but I like working on stuff that ships, so I prefer tools that don't require much work.
We had a similar discussion about computers the other day. A lot of us miss the days of tiny memory and optimizing for that.
It takes all kinds and I see no reason to gate keep either way. It's too bad that we do t often segregate around those opinions and don't share as much
> It takes all kinds and I see no reason to gate keep either way.
Gatekeeping is a good way to describe it. This happens to a lot of niche hobbies that go mainstream. Some of the old ingroup that were into the hobby before it was cool get irrationally angry at the new waves of adoption because they're in it for different reasons.
I don't care why someone is in a hobby. If you want to do it the easy way, good for you. Nothing has been taken away from those who want to do it the hard way. It's much easier to get started building custom machines now than it was when I was starting out.
> I do not know what you are talking about.
What are you talking about? Show me one survey that shows DIY crafts as a whole becoming more popular in the past several decades. It's just not a thing. People increasingly don't have room for it, computers and cell phones have won as a way to spend the bulk of our free time, and even if you want to create, the primary outlet is the digital world.
> 3D printing at home is more popular than ever
Sure, but that's a given because the technology didn't exist until very recently. I can also say that Tesla Cybertruck is more popular than ever, but that doesn't mean much, right.
> Even families I know who don’t have a computer at home, only their phones, now have 3D printers and use them.
A vanishingly tiny proportion of families in the US or in the EU own 3D printers and use them.
> What are you talking about? Show me one survey that shows DIY crafts as a whole becoming more popular in the past several decades.
Entry level 3D printer sales (the kind you buy from Prusa or Bambu Labs) have been surging for years.
You could Google this and find a thousand articles about it. The entry-level segment has grown massively and continues to expand https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/context-industrial-growt...
> Sure, but that's a given because the technology didn't exist until very recently.
I built my first 3D printer over 10 years ago. The latest printer I bought is much more refined, but it's still stepper motors, belts, a gear driven extruder, and a nozzle like my original printer. The technology has been around for a long time. The popularity explosion is recent.
> A vanishingly tiny proportion of families in the US or in the EU own 3D printers and use them.
We're talking about hobbies and that's how hobbies work, yes.
The hobby is growing significantly, though. Arguing that most households don't have a 3D printer is just a strawman.
A vanishing small number of people ever did those things. Many people owned tablesaws but they rarely used them to make something for fun. They owned the dream and subscribed to the magazines but they only rarely made anything.
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> There are more opportunities and knowledge available now for people who do want to build their own machines and it’s very cheap.
And what happens if China decides that it is no longer in their interest to allow Americans access to cheap aluminum extrusions, hotends, motors, and controllers?
Between the American tariffs and Chinese prioritization of 3d printing in a past five year plan American hobbyists and small scale producers are in a potential bind.
> And what happens if China decides that it is no longer in their interest to allow Americans access to cheap aluminum extrusions, hotends, motors, and controllers?
Then home 3D printing will be the least of our concerns? What kind of question is this?
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> The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects.
I've seen what people go through when they operate 3D printers. The impression I have is that they still make 2D inkjet printers look like paragons of reliability.
I wouldn't trade that time spent on my printers for anything. I wrote a post about this recently [1]
There was way more valuable things learned in the process than just making Benchy.
For years I have been trying to tell people this. The value of Reprap was not just "to have a printer".
[1] https://www.robosprout.com/thank-you-reprap-for-all-of-it/
Some people want to have an experience with their printer. Some people want it to be an appliance. If you wanted an appliance, and got an experience, you're going to be disappointed.
For people who genuinely wanted the experience of exploring 3D printers, like yourself, I'm very happy that those people got that experience.
For myself, just as I want to print documents and not have adventures with inkjet printers, I want to make things and not have adventures with 3D printers. Which is why I have no plans to own a 3D printer.
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I recently bought a Bambu Lab A1 printer. I went specifically with Bambu Lab because everything I read said that was the better choice if you want something low maintenance and easy to set up even if it’s not as open as some of the alternatives.
It’s stuck in the auto calibration stage. It gets halfway through then it stops with a generic error message. The UI around this is really clunky. I’ve tried searching online, asking Claude and nothing. I emailed customer support and they came back with cryptic instructions that assume familiarity with the internals of the machine.
I decided to leave this for a day when I wasn’t too mentally drained from work to debug issues in my free time and instead the machine has been collecting dust ever since.
Maybe it was a mistake to get a Bambi Lab? I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience.
Your experience is unusual for a Bambu. I know of numerous people who have purchased one and you are the only one who didn't have it "just work".
I’ve had several printers over more than a decade. Even the most reliable new units can still be difficult to debug little things. My cousin’s family got a Bambu printer with no technical or mechanical experience and gets it working well most of the time, but there are still things that can bite you like prints not sticking to the bed because it has oils on it or filament breaking in the feed path because PLA absorbs moisture from the air and becomes brittle. A modicum of attention can keep these problems in check but the operator has to do some reading and learning.
There is another set of people who are in 3D printing because they like the experience of debugging and improving the printer as much or more than the final prints they get from it. The most hardcore 3D printing people I know don’t actually print much other than 3D benchies and test towers because their fun comes from playing with the machine and trying new parts. Those people build a different set of printer types than the plug and play units used by most casual makers.
Crazy as it sounds, that’s the opposite of my personal experience.
Yeah in the four years I’ve had my Prusa it’s had basically no problems.
They’re a pain in the ass if you buy bottom of the barrel crap with sloppy tolerances for $100 I guess, but the same is true of regular printers.
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I think it’s never been a better time to be an at-home maker.
I built 3 Voron printers because there wasn’t a way to get close to that performance at a price I would choose to pay. I hand-converted a HF mill to DRO then to 2-axis CNC.
I can buy printers that are 90-95% as good for well under $1000 and 75-85% as good for $350 now.
CNC routers are readily available and good. Laser cutters are readily available, reasonably cheap, and good.
I just don’t see a broad migration to importing maker parts (other than PCBB/PCBA, which is phenomenal).
I feel like this has been a talking point for as long as off-the-shelf printers aimed at hobbyists have existed. Calling them AI factories is a bit off the mark imo, there are plenty of hobbyists that learn CAD and want to make their own stuff, but don't want to build their own printer. The kind of people who are interested in reprap are absolutely still around, and I really don't see that community going dissolving because of the rise of capable commercial printers.
That wasn't exactly what was said...
"it is now popular to just have someone else do it...be it AI or a factory in another country"
And sure there are some people interested in reprap but they have been scattered to the wind. #reprap IRC has become an advertising/support channel for commercial printers. If you go to most of the channels/forums where the development used to happen and mention you want to build a printer you will be flooded with responses about how stupid that is and provided with names/links of the printers you should be buying. Making things is a fool's errand.
Maybe my observations were different...maybe not...but from what I saw at about 2016 the whole DIY machine thing switched.
Thanks for clarifying your point. I didn't know about the reprap IRC channel being dead, that's a real shame
I believe part of it is the cost. It used to be too expensive to get something like a decent commercial 3D printer (though at the same time). Now you can get one for less than the cost of RepRap components back in the day, so it is stupid to do it if you just want to print stuff out (it might even be more expensive, and will likely produce worse prints).
If, however, you want to learn how to build one, or just have an experience of building your own tool you'll use to create stuff, it is most definitely not stupid to do it.
With 3D printing becoming mainstream, you'll have fewer people in those communities who support and live that approach though, and you'll need to look harder to find documentation and like-minded people.
I'm not sure if it's that simple. Many space-intensive DIY hobbies are on the retreat simply because more people are moving into cities or very dense suburbs where you have no practical opportunity to, say, build a woodworking shop. Metalworking was even more severely impacted, for obvious reasons.
Also, long before mail-order offshore manufacturing, people have been lured away from most of this by the promise of 3D printing. Every other techie I know owns a 3D printer. Most have not made anything interesting with it because they soon learn that the real difficulty is materials science and 3D design. But as a nerd, it's the thing you're supposed to own. In contrast, I know maybe four people in the SF Bay Area who are into woodworking, metalsmithing, CNC, or stuff like that.
I don't see mail-order prototyping as a conspiracy... it's more of a culmination of the DIY community chasing the mirage they were sold on in the early 2010s. I still remember the HN claims: home manufacturing revolution! It's the beginning of a brand new economy, why would anyone buy anything anymore when you can just click "print"... with some amusing parallels to how some folks now talk about building your own software with AI.
The mail-order stuff isn't evil insofar that it may allow some people to make things they couldn't make before. On the flip side, it's a very inefficient way to learn, so I think it will reduce hardware literacy among those who could afford a garage workshop.
FWIW, I think the same goes for AI-assisted hardware design. On one hand, I see people who otherwise wouldn't be DIYing getting into DIY: "I asked Claude and it one-shotted this rectangular enclosure for me, it's amazing!", "Claude made this RP2350 breakout board for me, how cool is that". But I also see established DIYers getting a degree of brain rot.
we have had a home manufacturing revolution, though, and making every kind of hardware is crazy accessible, look at the explosion of niche products in every single hobby space over the past ten years
I miss absolutely nothing about etching my own single layer PCBs at home
First, PCBs: neither do I, I'm not sure why you're assuming that's the position I want to take. This has nothing to do with 3D printing or mail-order metal parts.
Second, I don't think there's a revolution for the general population. Your archetypal middle-aged dad / curious teenager are DIYing less than 20 years ago, which in turn was less than 40 years ago. The stats here are clear, most of "garage" occupations are on the decline. Less space, higher costs, more emphasis on safety. Some hobbies, such as backyard chemistry, are effectively gone. Shop classes in most schools are gone. Making your own bookshelf or building a radio from a kit is no longer a rite of passage.
Third, the "explosion of niche products" - maybe, but I think some of it is just visibility. Kickstarter, HN, Hack-a-Day, and so on. Before that, we had hobby journals for woodworking, electronics, etc, and they were always full of ads for niche gear. You just weren't seeing the totality of it in a doom-scroll loop. Visibility has benefits, but my point is that the qualitative change isn't as profound.
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Re: factory in another country: I use and recommend craftcloud (Germany company that facilitates having your uploaded model be printed wherever and however you choose (and see prices of course). I am always able to find companies in the USA to print my designs. I had repeated good results with https://hudsoncreativegroup.com/ in AR. The only reason I haven’t done it myself is because I don’t have time to do it often enough and each time I get back into it I have to relearn about the material choice tradeoffs. If I had a better grasp of these things and get a less demanding tech job/replaced by AI :), I would research buying one.
Steel and aluminum costs way more than it did last year, as the tariffs are hitting the small manufacturers first.
Openbuilds was a slotted 2020 china rail kit company, and was very clear about community members being not allowed to post unrelated projects. There was nothing really "open" about their site, but it was more of a Mecano like product.
Sherline CNC mills were never as solid as Taig, but the mini-lathes were workable for small hobby projects (had mine for years till upgrading to a South Bend antique.)
3D printers are easier to use given they handle geometry impossible for milling. If I have a choice between printing or cutting a herringbone gear, than printing wins every time (time cost is zero for automation.)
There is also the export restriction on 5-axis machine CAM software now. Small CNC machines are a great way to learn, but most kids no longer have $7k to spend on a hobby. If you have long term space on property, than a full-sized worn old mill is a better investment (just don't climb mill if you want reasonable tolerances.)
The problem isn't just hobby mills/lathes, but many firms went under in the past few decades. Domestic manufacturers have mostly lost the skills needed to build things themselves. It is funny seeing old 1950's US milling machines (sold as scrap iron) still running small business in the India industrial strip.
Hobby 3D metal-printing + EDM/Grinder technology will probably fill the void, but people are going to see more suboptimal oddball composites.
>Maybe it's by design? I don't know.
Unlikely, just other people making money off of peoples short-term thinking. =3
Even China had a hard time keeping its milling factories fed over the years. The only difference was their government recognized the strategic importance. It is why you can now find drill/tap/chamfer combination carbide end mills in every metric size you could want.
>The ability to make things at home is disappearing
It is changing, for example instead of using noisy cutters people use shears to cut SAC305 solder bars. As in a hobby class 7 zone building space, your neighbors don't want to deal with noise, dust, or weird smells etc.
One will also see more low cost 3D printed mild steel in home 3D printers, as the amount of physical space needed to print an engine block for example is smaller than a fridge. The future is here, but people in the US will have to wait a few more years. You already know why =3
> i.e. Reprap
Nah, we just went with Bambu. No shade to the reprap community but my enjoyment of the hobby is with the printing of models, not tinkering with my machine constantly.
The amount of failed builds I got with the prusa xl due to its tool changer meant it was the last prusa my household will ever get
Do you expect the homeowner that needs to mow their lawn to build their own lawnmower? How about the "tech savvy" homeowner that wants an automated lawnmower? Should they be derided for buying one of the robot mowers instead of building their own? Should the person that needs a hammer and nails to build a raised bed for their gardening hobby be required to make the hammer or the nails, in the name of "learning something new/valuable"?
It comes down to the fact that these things are tools. Now that reasonably affordable "turnkey" or "off the shelf" options are available, what you're really seeing is the divide between those wanting building the tool itself as their hobby, and those that just want a tool to use on their other hobbies. There was less of a divide previously because for most people, the "just buy one" option simply didn't exist. Now it does.
I spent a lot of time over the years wire-wrapping circuits, then manually laying out and etching/making circuit boards, then using software to do the layouts while still etching/drilling boards myself, then learning and switching the bulk of my projects to surface-mount. It was a necessary part of making electronic bits for stuff I wanted, but I didn't enjoy that part. Now that I can draw something up, send it off and for a few bucks have professionally manufactured multi-layer boards in days/weeks, with many/most components already placed and soldered, why wouldn't I cut out the part I don't enjoy?
I played with 3d printers off and on from about 2006 onwards, though I never kept one around for any real length of time. I found that while I really wanted the capabilities, I didn't want "building and keeping a 3d printer running" to be my hobby. 20 years later, there are options that don't require printer maintenance to be it's own hobby, and I'm much more willing to keep one around.
I've had a couple Chinese-made mini-mills since 2002 -- Sieg X2s, if I remember the old naming scheme correctly, though they were sold by various importers with their own names/model numbers. I converted one to CNC operation in 2004. While I appreciate the work done by others that I could learn from, I did not enjoy the process or the project. If there had been a reasonably affordable "turnkey" option with the capabilities I wanted, I would have 100% taken it. If I needed another one now, with the options available, there's no way I'd bother to build my own. Even then, I would have gone with sherline's early cnc offerings -- they fit my budget, but were just too small for what I wanted to do.
My first CNC router was scratch-built in the early 2000s. My current one came in a crate 4 years ago, and cost about half of what building a new one with the same capabilities from scratch would have. Instead of spending a several months' worth of weekends building it, I spent one weekend unpacking it and setting it up, another fine-tuning it and the software settings, and then was able to start using it for projects I enjoyed.
The ability for people to make things at home is expanding, just not in the way you'd like to see. That isn't a bad thing.
At the end of the day, time is what is ultimately valuable, and I don't have nearly as much of it as I did when I was younger. At this point, I'd much rather spend what time I do have enjoying my hobbies and creating the things I want to create, not building tools or suffering through tasks I hate simply because someone else thinks that is the important part. It seems I'm not the only one.
As for companies that "care" disappearing, well, that's just the current business environment. When the only measure of success that's deemed important is the stock value -- or potential stock value, in the case of startups -- customer service is an expense that can be cut to inflate next months' quarterly report. In exchange, the concept of customer loyalty is dying as well.