3D printers: why are they needed and how they work

The dreams of science fiction writers are beginning to take on a consumer reality: 3D printers are entering the mass market, and today almost anyone can buy them. You can print yourself a gun or a mock house. You might want to print the book The Silmarillion, and then you'll need to count its pages for accuracy, which you can do at Title Page Generator completely free of charge. This tool can come in handy for more than just 3D printing.

Since conventional 2D printers have already lost their potential for development - everything that is possible and impossible has already been developed - it is time to turn our eyes to printing in three-dimensional space. Admit it, you have dreamed more than once that you could not buy things for yourself, but just print them. And today it is already possible, however, with a lot of reservations.

3D printers are in vogue today. Several hundred models have already been released, but this does not mean anything: they all work basically according to the same principle, and even the "proprietary software" uses the same, sometimes differing only in the color of the buttons. We emphasize that we are talking about the models of today: such printers are rapidly evolving, and tomorrow (or in a month) something revolutionary and stunning may appear on the market.

So what is a 3D printer for home use? It is a device that uses the method of layer-by-layer fabrication of a physical object from a virtual 3D model. The first printers of this type appeared 30 years ago, and today they are represented by a dozen different types. We will not list them, but we will pay close attention to one type that is most accessible to an ordinary user today: an FDM 3D printer. FDM stands for Fused Deposition Modeling.

What for?

The first thing you need to understand for yourself is why, in fact, do you need a 3D printer? What do we want - just to have fun and create models and mockups? Use a printer for business? Embody creative fantasies? Business, of course, appreciated 3D printing for a long time: such world industrial giants as Airbus, Boeing, General Electric, Ford, Siemens, NASA use them all the time; and this is not to mention the engineers, scientists, doctors and a huge number of small entrepreneurs.