Towards the tail end of 2017, the famed for its middle aisle supermarket chain ALDI had a deal on a 3D printer, for £300. It was badged as Balco but was in fact just a re-branded version of the Chinese brand Wanhao.
£300 probably seems like a reasonable price for a consumer grade 3D printer these days, but in 2017 that was an outrageously good deal, when US brands were selling models for thousands. If I’m honest up until this point I had regarded polymer based 3D printing as a bit of a toy technology that was no substitute for a proper workshop, but at this price I didn’t feel like I could turn the opportunity down and went for it. I expected I would get some use light use out of it but ultimately it would be underused – how wrong I was. To say it’s transformed how I approach making would be an understatement. One of, if not the first things I decided to make was a replacement for one half of my electronic Hormann HSE2 garage door bipper. Made from ABS, it had been dropped several times, inevitably cracked and despite my best efforts wasn’t amenable to being glued back together.
Having previously used Solidworks a bit, this was one of my first forays into Autodesk Fusion.
With the benefit of hindsight this was probably not a great thing to have chosen as a first 3D printing project given its complexity and lack of obvious ideal print orientation, bearing in mind that slicers were still quite primitive at this stage and there wasn’t such a thing as tree supports or anything similar.
Nevertheless despite needing a fair bit of post processing, it worked quite well and I used it for many years. Eventually I ended up getting a new fob, I can’t specifically remember why but my repair is still intact should I get clumsy again.
Interestingly this is one of the more popular of the prints I’ve put on Printables and Thingiverse. I suppose lots of people break them.