By "3D print" you of course mean going to a home improvement store and buying some wooden boards and metal attachment pieces. 3D printing is totally unsuitable for the task, both because of low durability of printed objects and the time it would take you to print a pad like this (a few days, probably).

This is actually a pretty good application for home 3d printing.

I'd say that you'd be looking at 8-10 hours per print with a consumer FDM (extruded plastic) printer on the default settings.

If the printer is correctly configured it will probably be more durable than you're implying, and even if it only lasts a year you could always cheaply print more.

Really, that's the time it takes to print an object that size with off-the-shelf 3D printers? I have no experience in this area, so my (uncalibrated) expectations for 3D printing were that it might take a couple hours.

Here's a ~6" tall hollow rabbit being printed in roughly 7 hours. 3D printers are still just useless and awful. The promise is clear if they ever improve but for now, especially the cheaper home variety, they just don't do anything useful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx81wv0KRmY&feature=share

> they just don't do anything useful.

We use a cheap 3D printer weekly to make little fixtures, brackets and mounts for robots. These we use for months or years. They are also incredibly great for prototyping: print the doohickey in crappy plastic, check it fits together right, then get it made for real. It's amazing how helpful it is to have a model in your hand for debugging before spending a fortune.

I would amend that to "commercial grade 3D printers are terrible and awful". There are some monsters out there that can pump out amazing stuff quickly, but they come with a hefty price tag. And some use lasers, so that's super cool.

Consumer 3d printing is invaluable for small batch rapid prototyping. I can design and print multiple revisions of a prototype in as many hours. That type of efficiency was previously out of reach(expensive) for tiny, bootstrapped product design teams. It's a huge win.

It is definitely not ready for my Nana to print out a new frame for her eyeglasses after she accidentally sits on them. But it will be one day.

Once you start treating the output as something you can make a mold out of, it makes a lot more sense. Print something out, create a mold, then cast your real parts with that mold in short order.

Print speed depends a lot on the layer height (smaller height = more layers = more time) and infill amount.

We're primarily using a Printrbot Simple Metal at my local makerspace, and I usually expect a solid object the size of my fist, 20% infill, PLA, to run 3-4 hours.

Print times vary enormously for the same object depending on the settings the operator selects. I might be able to print you something in an hour at low detail, low strength settings, but the same object could easily take 30-50 hours if you crank those same settings to the max.