Bridges are a part of our constructed landscape that we take for granted. And bridges by themselves aren’t especially important. What is important is that bridges let you get from one place to another. Technology is often the same. We get from point A to point B through some bridge technology that, probably, most normal people never even notice.
Years ago, point A was commercial 3D printing. Industry had stereolithography, selective laser sintering, fused deposition modeling, and other rapid-prototyping technologies. These were not toys. They were expensive industrial systems used by companies that needed prototypes badly enough to pay serious money for them.
Fast Forward to Today
Today, you can go to a big box store and buy a 3D printer for well under $1,000, and often far less. Modern machines are almost plug-and-play and tend to do all the hard parts for you. That’s point B. How we got between points is a story of hackers who had a dream, and many Hackaday readers lived through it and even played a part in that bridging.
For a long time, RepRap was synonymous with hobby-level 3D printing. The project, started by [Adrian Bowyer] at the University of Bath in 2005, was built around a powerful idea: a machine that could print many of its own parts, thereby helping make more machines. RepRap Darwin reached its early self-replicating milestones in 2008, and the movement produced a thicket of descendants, variants, and arguments about rods, belts, bearings, extruders, firmware, and what “self-replicating” really meant. Of course, the machine could only print some of the parts you needed, but it was still impressive how much of a printer you could make with one printer.
Without RepRap, the desktop 3D printer boom would have looked very different. It created a common pool of ideas: Cartesian frames, printed brackets, hobbed bolts, heated beds, RAMPS boards, Marlin firmware, and a whole common vocabulary. It also created the expectation that a 3D printer was something you could understand, modify, repair, and improve. That expectation would not survive everywhere, but it defined the early culture.
Kicking Kickstarter
By the early 2010s, 3D printing had the right ingredients for a crowdfunding explosion. The technology was visible enough to be exciting, but not yet mature enough to be boring or attract big players. Hackerspaces were multiplying. Arduino had made embedded tinkering feel approachable. Laser-cut plywood, stepper drivers, and commodity motion hardware were easy to source. There were enough RepRap veterans to know what worked, and enough newcomers to believe the next machine would finally make 3D printing simple.
Kickstarter was a perfect amplifier. A desktop 3D printer looked good in a campaign video. It moved. It made things. It appeared to turn imagination directly into plastic. Printrbot was one of the defining examples. [Brook Drumm’s] original Printrbot campaign launched in 2011 and became one of the notable early 3D printer crowdfunding successes, raising far beyond its initial goal. The pitch was seductive: a printer you could afford, build, and actually use. Not an industrial system, not a laboratory instrument, but your first 3D printer.
I had a Printrbot Plus built from a kit, and that experience says a lot about the period. It was not a toaster. It was not even quite a drill press. It was more like buying a small CNC machine from a bright, optimistic friend who assumed you owned calipers, weren’t afraid of firmware, and could recognize when a machine was racking itself out of square. You can see some very old YouTube videos of my machine below.
The Printrbot was charming because it was so direct. There was very little mystery in it. It was made from wood! Even some of the gears were wooden. You could see the rods, belts, pulleys, endstops, and wiring. You could also see the compromises. The Printrbot used LM8UU linear bearings that were, in some cases, held in place with zip ties. This was not necessarily as terrible as it sounds; zip ties are a valid engineering material if your tolerance stack and expectations are sufficiently charitable. But the bearings could be a little loose. The folk remedy was equally period-correct: jam a bit of 3 mm filament in there as a wedge to keep the bearing from wiggling.
That little trick captures the mood of the time. The printer came from a factory, or at least from a company, but it still expected you to meet it halfway. It was full of these tiny bits of tribal knowledge. Blue tape on glass. Hairspray. Kapton. ABS juice. Tighten the belts, but not too much. Level the bed with a piece of paper, unless you had a feeler gauge, unless the bed was warped, in which case all bets were off. If the extruder skipped, maybe the nozzle was clogged, or the filament was too fat, or the hot end was too cold, or the hobbed gear was packed with dust, or the phase of the moon was affecting your controller board. Ok, maybe not the last one.
Solidoodle
Solidoodle was another emblem of that period. Founded in 2011 by [Sam Cervantes], the company pushed hard on affordability, with early machines such as the Solidoodle 2 attracting attention partly because they promised a usable enclosed printer at a price that seemed startling at the time. Wired covered the Solidoodle in 2012 as an assembled $499 machine, which was exactly the sort of price that made people start thinking desktop 3D printing might jump from hackerspaces to ordinary homes.
The Solidoodle story also shows the danger of that moment. The market wanted cheap, reliable, attractive, assembled, easy-to-use machines. The technology could supply maybe three of those at once. Companies were trying to scale production, support beginners, improve hardware, and hit aggressive prices while the entire field was still learning what “reliable” even meant for a low-cost filament printer. Solidoodle eventually suspended operations in 2016, a fate that befell more than one early desktop 3D printing company.
Part of Solidoodle’s problem was that they were too invested in the original RepRap idea. I almost bought a Solidoodle because I was fearful of trying to put a kit together with so many mechanical parts. Why didn’t I? Because RepRap lead times were enormous. At least part of the problem was that they were using Solidoodle printers to produce parts for Solidoodle printers.
Say you have ten printers. You get orders for 100. Great, right? But getting parts for those 100 printers done on your ten printers will take a long time. Of course, you could take the first ten to help, but now you can only ship 90 printers. If you only had 100 orders, you’d be fine. But in the printer-starved 2010s, a cheap printer like Solidoodle or Printrbot would get orders faster than they could fill them, and had to decide if they’d fill orders faster or try to make do with their existing printer farms. There really isn’t a right answer to that question. We heard that [Brook], for example, expected to sell 50 printers through Kickstarter. They wound up with a backlog of over 1,000 printers. Within a year they had $2 million in sales and it went up from there. Until, of course, it didn’t.
MakerBot
MakerBot deserves mention here, too, although it occupies a slightly different lane. It started in the open-source maker world and became the company most associated with the dream of consumer 3D printing. For a while, it seemed like MakerBot might become the Apple II of 3D printers. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about trying to turn a hacker tool into a mass-market appliance too quickly. The machines got slicker, the company moved away from its open-source roots, and the consumer revolution failed to arrive on schedule. By 2016, even mainstream coverage was asking what happened to the 3D printing revolution that had been promised.
But failure is too simple a word. The Kickstarter-era machines did not fail in the way that, say, a fad diet fails. They moved the ball down the field. They trained a generation of users. They revealed what mattered: rigid frames, better motion systems, predictable extrusion, heated beds that stayed flat, slicers that didn’t require a sacrificial offering, and firmware that could recover from ordinary user behavior. They also created demand. People who bought a Printrbot or a Solidoodle might have cursed it, modified it, and eventually replaced it, but they knew what they wanted next.
And what they wanted next was cheaper and better. That leads to the next wave: the low-cost commodity printers. The Monoprice Select Mini was one of the machines that made people do a double-take (see the video below). It was small, inexpensive, and not especially glamorous, but it was also a complete 3D printer at a price (around $200) that, up to that point, had seemed impossible. The Anet A8 represented another branch of the same tree: a very cheap kit printer, descended in spirit from RepRap machines, that put a large-ish build volume within reach of people willing to accept risk, tinkering, and sometimes questionable electrical design.
The End?
These machines were not the end state either. The cheap printers democratized access, but many still required an operator rather than a mere owner. The Anet A8 in particular became infamous not just for its low price but for the upgrades people considered mandatory: better firmware settings, frame braces, MOSFET boards, power supply caution, and general fire-safety paranoia. Still, it mattered. A rough kit at $150 or $200 changes a market. It lets students, hackers, model builders, repair-minded homeowners, and the merely curious take a chance. My A8 is unrecognizable today with an aluminum frame and a 32-bit controller board, a proper 24V power supply, a custom hot end mount, and other enhancements.
You can see my original A8 (and a peek at the Printrbot in the background) in the video below.
A few years later, it looked like this video.
The real consumer-ready printers came later, after years of iteration. Auto bed leveling became common. Filament paths improved. Machines got stiffer. Slicers became far better. PEI spring steel sheets replaced a lot of glass-and-hairspray rituals. Direct drive and better Bowden setups reduced extrusion drama. Enclosed CoreXY machines brought speed without quite so much ringing and finagling. Companies learned that the printer had to be a system: hardware, firmware, slicer profiles, materials, documentation, and support.
Right, Yet Wrong
Looking back, the funny thing is that the early hype was both wrong and right. Desktop 3D printers did not become like inkjet printers, and they certainly did not become like microwave ovens. Most people do not need to manufacture a plastic bracket before breakfast. Most people do not want to think about layer adhesion, nozzle wear, or whether that weird clicking noise is the extruder eating the filament.
I lived through the time when the hacker dream was that every home would have a computer. Most of us didn’t see what would really happen. Every person has at least one computer; every home has dozens. But we were on the right track; most of us just didn’t see what would drive it. But I never really thought 3D printers would become as common as personal computers.
I did think it might become like a drill press. Not everyone has a drill press. In fact, most people probably do not. But no one is amazed to learn that you have one. It is a normal thing for a certain kind of person to own. If you fix things, build things, make brackets, or restore equipment, a drill press is not exotic. It is just one of the tools that may live in the shop.
That is where 3D printing has largely landed. Not universal, but ordinary. A decade ago, saying you had a 3D printer was a conversation starter. People wanted to see it move. They wanted to know if you could print a wrench, a phone case, a toy, or, inevitably, another printer. Today, in technical circles, saying you have a 3D printer is more like saying you have a bench vise. The interesting question is not whether you have one, but what you use it for.
That normalization is the real legacy of the awkward Kickstarter era. Those machines were crude, but they were legible. They let us see the process. They forced us to learn what mattered. They converted 3D printing from an industrial service into a shop skill. A Printrbot with zip-tied LM8UU bearings and bits of filament jammed in as shims was not a consumer appliance. It was a bridge.
And like many bridges, it was not the destination. It was the thing that got us there. Of course, things continue to move. Maybe one day we will look back on the current generation of printers and wonder how we ever used them. But, like the personal computer, we probably can’t imagine what is going to drive the adoption of those new machines.
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