Kitchen Garden Forum

This caught my attention recently and I must say I'm quite intrigued.

This new technology '3d printing' can actually help us create our own gardening tools. Lord knows a little money in my pocket wouldn't hurt these days but is this for real?

If yes, I would love to make my own garden site like this one:
https://pinshape.com/items/8715-3d-printed-pen-lid-garden-set

Has anyone tried building their own tools and to be more specific, perhaps by using 3d printing?

Given the cost of 3d printers you'd have less money in your pocket and given the materials the more affordable ones 'print' with any tools you made will be small, shouldn't last very long or be very strong.

Fine for making as your link showed some decorative pen top ornaments.

The technology behind 3D printing is amazing - my brother in law is an architect and uses it regularly producing fantastic scaled models.

However, as Peter says - very expensive and probably wouldn't last anytime at all. Just my opinion but Better to use your money to buy good quality tools that will last you for many years.

Car companies (and other engineering concerns) use ones to produce prototype parts.
Although computer controlled multi - tool multi - axis milling machines can turn a block of aluminium into pretty much whatever you tell them to, there is more capability for delicacy and intracate stuff with 3d especially at the expensive end.
Two different wavelength lasers at right angles to each other working in a transparent tank of "gloop" where the two intersect and nowhere else the gloop becomes solid and the solid remains supported by the gloop. I think saying "at right angles to each other" is a simplification as well.

There are lots of different 3D printers now. The “domestic” ones use a table onto which a nozzle extrudes a bead of molten plastic. This builds up the shape of the object required from a computer design. Industrial types can use the same idea with a bead of weld to make steel parts, though they are very expensive and are not yet able to do accurate work. I get sheet metal parts cut by water jet from computer designs. These would once have required a press tool costing thousands of pounds, not 3D, but used much more for parts manufacturing.

I know that confectionists are using 3D printers to make intricate chocolate, icing and candy designs etc. Apparently there are relatively affordable food 3D printers that can achieve this now so I think over the next year or so you'll see them more in the smaller confectionery outlets. The possibilities are endless and versions of 3D printers are used throughout many industries by the major manufactures. I'm a big foodie so the food side of 3D printing blows my mind and some of the things that I've seen them produce re mind-blowing.