Sadly, 3D printers are still cheaper.

I once needed to make a few customized gears out of food safe plastic. I asked several online services for quotes and I called several on-location shops in northern Germany. The quotes I got were all around $1800 per unique gear shape. Since I needed 4 different shapes (i.e. $7k for outsourcing), it was much cheaper to buy a 3D printer, watch some tutorials and spend two working days just to make them myself.

Plus I honestly don't know why Shapeways (for example) will always quote you multiple weeks in lead time. What do they do in those 2 weeks after the print finished but before they send the parcel?

Would you consider the parts you made foodsafe? Or would you have to use the parts to make a mold, then produce foodsafe parts? The nooks and crannies in 3d printed plastic, plus the less controlled melting/cooling has concerned me for making something which is food safe. Mostly the concern about places for bacteria to hide on the parts.

It also depends on what you are doing. If they are single-use, they can be made food-safe pretty easily, even with the nooks and crannies. With 3d printing, it can be pretty cheap to do single-use stuff. You can also electro-plate them with silver and have a pretty sanitary part.

> You can also electro-plate them

You can electro-plate thermoplastic?

Yes. It generally involves applying a mildly conductive layer first, for which there are a variety of techniques.

Probably the only way to make it reliably foodsafe without a lot of postprocessing would be replacing the parts frequently. It's possible to perfectly merge the layers by printing with 100% infill, burying the part in fine grained salt and then remelting it in an oven, but that takes time.

No, the stuff that directly comes out of the 3D printer is not foodsafe. Some of it is biocompatible, though, which means you can safely lick it for a while. But you can use 3D printing to create foodsafe molds and then use them to cast foodsafe plastic copies of your 3D-printed master.

you probably get scheduled in the down time between actually important clients.

> Plus I honestly don't know why Shapeways (for example) will always quote you multiple weeks in lead time

Because they can get you to pay more to skip the wait, probably.

I have multiple small plastic components that have broken for my appliances and use some quick fixes to get the appliance working again, but they eventually break again. These cheap pieces of plastic can never be purchased alone and require buying a much more expensive part which includes the cheaper plastic piece.

Saying that, 3D printing really seems like something I'd like to start doing and build my own parts to fix things myself. Any recommendations on a printer to use?

I wouldn't call it a recommendation, but I suffer through using my Formlabs SLA printer because the results are of amazing quality. But their resin is expensive, you need 2 additional machines if you want to do the washing and curing halfway conveniently and since the beginning (and still ongoing) there have been firmware issues which cause the machine to sometimes lock you out of a DRM-ed resin cartridge before it is actually empty ... but in exchange you get a pretty reliable 0.1mm precision on stable waterproof parts that look like they were injection molded. With the right settings, nobody will recognize the parts as 3D printed because there are no visible layer lines at all and after a bit of varnish you can get the clear resin to be see-through like acrylic glass.

That's a high end looking printer, with a high end price. How much 3D printing do you do? Which model specifically do you own? Really nice looking stuff.

>People consistently fail to value their time, and the startup cost.

For many people, most of it is spent doing such BS, doom-scrolling, binge-watching, games, and so on, that taking time making DIY stuff would be quite an improvement with regards to value their time, outcome, and even their mental health.

exactly - I would call this the "forgetting the entertainment value" fallacy :)

Also you can't turn your time into money as fungible as spending money is. So Tme is more "liquid" than cash.

That said I got a 3d printer in mid-2016 and basically printed daily getting to know it until the start of 2019 - I had sooo much fan turning the wooden printer i started out with into something reliable. Nowadays i mainly print stuff as I design and need it a couple times a month.

Time is not money. When you spend money - you lose money. When you don't spend time - you lose time!

If you sell your time for a living, then time (during certain parts of the day), does have a value. If you aren't selling your time and are doing something else, you are losing money.

For the vast majority of people who sell their time for a living, their time doesn't actually have value because they are either on salary, and cannot exchange more time for more money, or their manager controls their schedule and they do not get to choose how much time they get to sell for how much money.

With inflation when you don't spend money you lose money too.

Eh, at some point you end up with a backlog of things to do where you never have unspent time.

I've got about 3-500 hours left on a home renovation project, 10-20 on a playhouse for my daughter, 50 or so on a desk for myself, 1000 on a personal programming project, I really need to spend about 500 hours getting back into shape, and all of that is competing for the time I have left after the weekly commitments I have to my day job, my family, and basic self-care.

Practically speaking I'm working with about 10-20 hours a week here of discretionary spending, maybe 30 or so if I'm really tight and can use all the disjoint minutes effectively, and will get through my current backlog in 2-3 years. If nothing else comes up that's higher priority.

I don't value my time at zero, I just think making something is more valuable than my time.

You are correct about the utility calculation, of course.

It's just that many people can afford to have hobbies, and hobbies do not have to earn money or be a good investment in order to be worth doing.

But what's the fun in just buying stuff? Imagine every problem is solved with money, there is no taste to anything amymore.. if she could just buy a foldable hanger this video was much shorter, not fun, not interesting..

I think you're missing the point, which is that for some people making things is immensely rewarding