While in France, the combination of being somewhere near church mouse poor and living in a small (32 square metres / 350 sq ft) 1 bedroom apartment, I looked for hobbies that took up little space and so settled on photography (i.e. my
Project 365 here) and dabbling in computer programming and to a lesser degree, artificial intelligence (my
WmDOT for OpenTTD). It was quite enjoyable, but on my return to North America, I found myself with a lot more space and more geographically stable. I wanted to make things that were a little more physical and so with the encouragement of my Honey, I started into Model Railroading, a childhood dream. One of my shocks was the cost of models! A regular-ish building, measuring maybe 2x3x3 inches would cost $60! There had to be a better way...
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| My brand new locomotive! |
ENTER 3D PRINTING. Various technologies exist but the most popular, at least at the hobby level, basically consists of a hot metal nozzle that melts a 'thread' of plastic and then uses this melted plastic to paint, layer by layer, your desired object. A kit for a printer like this can be had for ~$1300 which would be about the same price as 20 buildings. And with a 3D printer, most of the time is spent creating the computer model rather than in physical model building, so I started wondering if I could sell some models and let someone else pay for my printer and railway modelling...
