I said farewell to my 3D printer yesterday. I gave it to my good friend Mark Waddington. Mark, like me, is not 3D printer adept, but I do believe he has the persistence and the “tool IQ” to figure it out. I probably tried at least 20 prints, all but one of them ending in abject failure. Though Mark and I fiddled with the print settings all day in August, it just seemed more than I was willing to continually subject myself to.
I bought the printer under less than optimal conditions. Amazon Prime Day 2022 had a deal on the Elegoo Saturn S bundle. It was very reasonably priced and so from a financial standpoint it was a super deal. However, it was also a couple of months after Casey died, and the rule is, don’t make any major purchases while you’re grieving. It’s not that the printer cost as much as a car or I invested in Florida swamp-land, or anything like that, but in game expense comparison, it was significant.
The tide really turned against keeping the Saturn when I began seeing commercial printing sites offering the specific models I purchased the files to print. I’ve been in contact with Chad Weyenberg at Iron Horse Collectibles. He is printing David Manley’s files for ACW ships. They are very reasonably priced. I’ve ordered eight models and they’ve already shipped. I’ll review these after I get them, but I find this to be really significant
War Times Journal is no longer printing their ship models, but three sites in the U.S. are printing them for much less than WTJ did. I can’t say I’m having a ton of success communicating with them, but I’m trying. I keep in mind that these are all small companies probably with the owner having a day job.
I know Mark will print stuff for the two of us when he figures things out. But I had to face up to a simple fact. I love painting figures. That’s something I’m reasonably good at, and diverting myself from that purpose with something else I don’t have any feel for is just a mistake. I always believed that 3D printing was almost a separate hobby. It’s almost more like an art and a science. I really admire those who are able to stick with it make it work for them. It’s just not something I could do.
A Gamer's Tales 
Seems like a good decision.
I don’t blame you at all – I like the idea of 3D home printing but I have zero IT or mechanical skills and unless I could just plug it in, fill it with the resin or whatever and import the STL file (you can see I have no idea how the things actually work!) and it just printed the model as I wanted it – the whole exercise would just be a huge waste of time! (AND money!)
I too have purchased 3D printed stuff from people who specialise in it, and I have found them reasonably priced and the figures perfectly acceptable in quality, so I will also probably stick with that, unless a less Luddite friend gets into the art!