Fusion 360, FDM printing, and a lot of failed first attempts. Learning how things are actually made.
How it started
One of my favorite things as a kid was show and tell. One day a kid brought in his 3D printer and had it print fun things from movies. From that point on I realized the capabilities this machine could have and all of the ideas flooded my brain. I didn't want to just print fun downloaded prints but I wanted to make my own work. So I figured out how to make that happen.
It started with getting a 3D printer for my birthday. It was a small 200$ 5"x5" bed, but it blew me away. I outused that machine for a year, but then I outgrew it. I needed a bigger more capable machine. My parents then got a Prusa Mk3s+ a $2,000 Machine at the time. I was beyond excited. I treated it like my pride and joy. However I didn't yet know how to make my own parts and CAD seemed too hard to learn at the time. so I made a few projects but then it sat. for about 2 years. However, then I learned I could get a free version of Fusion 360 at my school. After that, I went wild. I watched a few videos and then got to work. I took on work starting with my mom's class where I made 24 sets of clock hands for classroom materials. I was Learning CAD from scratch, understanding how dimensions and constraints relate to each other, and slowly building an instinct for what's actually manufacturable.
What I've made
Some of it is practice. Some of it I actually use. The stuff I care about most required real iteration — printing, testing, adjusting tolerances, printing again.
The Learning Curve
My first real failure was a print that detached mid-job. The bed wasn't clean, so the filament wouldn't adhere. The fix was obvious once I knew it — IPA, a scraper, a few minutes of prep. But you only learn that by ruining a print first. That's the whole deal with 3D printing: every failure is the cheapest way to learn something that would've taken hours to read about and still not fully understand.
Where this goes
The reason I care about 3D printing isn't the printing itself — it's that designing and making physical things from scratch is the core skill underneath mechatronics and engineering. A printed part that just sits on a shelf is useless. A printed part that holds a sensor mount on a robot that actually moves is interesting.
That's the direction. The FTC robotics program I started at Cardinal Newman is where these skills actually get used — designing parts in Fusion 360 that have to survive competition, mounting hardware, holding tolerances under load.