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.