Welcome to the first installment of Maggie's Adventures in 3D Printing!

I'm Maggie Gilmore, the community associate at Groover Labs. I'm the first face you'll see when you come in the door.

In my free time, I love walking my dog, watching (good and bad) movies, listening to podcasts, playing video games and drinking espresso. Other hobbies I dabble in include knitting, sewing, woodworking and pretty much any DIY project I think I have the tools for. I'm also the owner of ICT Dice, a company that makes dice with local restaurants named on all the sides to settle arguments about where to go out to eat! It's been on hiatus for a couple of years, but I am working on re-launching in the near future. More on that later.

I've been aware of 3D printing for quite some time (I believe I first heard about it in Wired magazine eight to 10 years ago), but for a long time it was unobtainable due to the high cost of the machines, even the hobby ones. As the price of hobby machines has gone down though, I've definitely become more and more curious about the process and have intended to look into it when I had some free time! Fast forward to the Covid-19 crisis.

Here at Groover Labs, we wanted to make the best use of our time and resources while most of our members were sheltering-in-place and working from home, so we took to making different kinds of PPE. Tracy (one of our co-founders) and I brought in our sewing machines and made hundreds of cloth face masks that we donated to friends, family and anyone in the community that expressed a need. And Curt (our other co-founder) and Jeremiah (one of our maker lab leads) became involved with a group that was organizing local 3D printer owners to print parts for protective face shields. It was through this that I got my first hands-on experience with a 3D printer as we relocated all of the printers to the front lobby for easier access.

In an effort to maximize the number of face shields we could print, we tried to keep the machines running as close to 24/7 as possible. This meant that I came in on the weekend mornings to get the first print running again. I'm a morning person and would be up getting coffee anyway. So I got my first, very basic experience running a 3D printer, and the gears started turning with ideas for other things I could possibly make in the future.

As local demand for PPE has been mostly met, we've stopped printing face shields (although we are still laser-cutting them, which can be seen at https://www.grooverlabs.org/face-shields) and the 3D printers have opened up for me to start experimenting. I'll be posting updates to this thread as I start learning more about the process of printing and designing objects to be printed, so if you've ever had an interest but haven't had access to the technology yourself, stay tuned.