With some time on my hands, I've decided to teach myself CAD and where better to start than building a better mousetrap (or chastity device)? I have the hang of it now and have added a couple of simple designs to my gallery. My next question though is 3D printing. What materials, pros and cons, and which machine? I'm doing this on a hobby budget before anyone suggests something super expensive, and I know that the print area is smaller on small machines. Fortunately, chastity is quite a small build. Any recommendations? Thanks
I would recommend starting with PETG. PLA is less strong and tends to break with more sharp edges. So any cheap machine that can do PETG temperatures will probably work. There's plenty of general advice on printers available online. The color filament that you pick matters a bit. Especially white can be tricky. Lastly, invest in some weakmaker-free epoxy to coat the print with.
This is the latest 3D printed tube for my full belt. It was printed on an Ender 2 pro at low quality (0.2mm layer height I think) and using PLA. One advantage of PLA is that it can be altered slightly by warming it. I have a hair drier that can get it hot enough. Near boiling water works as well. I've never tried PETG. If I ever get to the point where I do not want to make any more alterations I will probably try PETG and use a higher quality. That will take about 7 hours to print I think. The pictures show an image from the CAD package on the left and the printed result on the right. The tube was printed sitting on the flat base plate, which was removed after printing. That way, no other support was required. Thickness is 2mm.
3D printing can be fun and frustrating. I’d suggest getting a mud priced printer like an Ender 3 series. Get some PLA+ filament and learn to get good consistent prints from free files from sites like Thangs and Thingiverse. After that the sky is the limit once you learn 3D people usually start with PLA filament then go to PETG, then ABS and flexible ones such as TPU But PLA is where you need to start as it’s forgiving while you learn.