Sneak peak into the finished product:
Everything started in 2017, when I was 14 years old. I saved up money from my summer job in a Sports equipment store to purchase some resemblance of a 3D printer.
I ended up going with the Tevo Tarantula. For the time it was cheap enough and much better construction quality than anything else I could afford. Other printers were made of either acrylic plastic instead of the main frame being metal, or way to expensive for what I could afford, like the legendary Prusa i3. (I think I made 200 Euros from a full month of work after taxes).
I shipped the main parts from Aliexpress and began to assemble it based on some Youtube tutorials at the time. It was thrilling, but definitely out of my comfort zone at the time. All the small electrical wiring, needing to make the frame all even and thigh, but not too tight to not snap the connecting plastic pieces. And then the first prints could be started.
First prints were definitely rough around the edges, but most importantly it worked. It lacked a part fan for whatever it was making, the wiring was all over the place (motherboard being reasonably exposed), everything was belt driven on wheels making it unstable and uneven at times, the Z motor was mounted on top (so it needed to pull everything and not push making the plastic bracket bend, potentially even snap)
But then I discovered the beautiful thing about a 3D printer. It is a living organism!
Because it can make practically anything out of melting some plastic, it means it can make upgrades and improvements for itself as well. At the start I printed a mount for the part cooling fan and changed the printer bed frame to run on rails.
At some point I added a second Z motor for less vertical wobble and put them on the bottom by printing some brackets for them to sit in. Some more smaller pieces later, I bought two Ikea tables, put them one on another, printed some raisers for the printer to fit in and this made a self-made, self-contained box for it. (Invertedly the wire nest got really bad at this time)
It was an amazing adventure, and probably more than anything, it made the most pieces for itself rather than for anything or anyone else. It still proudly sits at my old house, being ready to stretch its robotic motor-arms for the next Christmas gingerbread cookie cutters to print.
It was awesome building, learning, messing things up and fixing them, trying open-source firmware, understanding that it needs to be tweaked otherwise it will spin the motors the other way. And all of this at the time when 3D printing content only started to appear on the internet, let alone about the very specific one that I had.
P.S.
With the help of my dads connections within road construction, I got to test out infill strengths on an asphalt press for a high school project. Then covid started and I never wrote the actual paper (thank God for that actually. My project supervisor changed 3 times and only too late I understood what kind of literature review I would need to write and understand. Practically a Master thesis level engineering assignment). I came into this thinking that it is a fun IT project, when in reality it was 99% engineering and material stress testing. Nevertheless, satisfying seeing the filament cylinders getting squeezed with multiple tons of pressure, even if unlike in those viral Youtube videos.
