Finally disassembled the 3D printer that's been sitting in the closets and basements of various apartments and houses over the last ten years. It was an early Printrbot model that I bought in the midst of high school, and had to put together part-by-part.
I was super stoked about it at the time, and still am very enamoured by 3D printers... maybe I was born with a materialist philosophical bent or something, but when I was a kid I remember thinking about "a computer that can make anything", and it's wild to think that in the short years between childhood and adolescence, that kind-of-ridiculous-sounding dream started to wink into reality.
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One of my favourite things about this printer was how I ended up just using it as a pen plotter for most of its life. Pretty early on, I downloaded, printed out, and hand-and-power-tool-carved some parts to make it easy to clip a pen or pencil in place to get some drawings going.
I later set up a larger Polargraph pen plotter while I was in weird pseudo-post-secondary art school, and that was a ton of fun. Excited to find and scan some of the work from both machines soon.
In any case, I've now very much said goodbye to this printer, having broken it down into all the tiniest bits that made sense, from stepper motors, to nuts and bolts, a beefy power supply, and of course the main board above. One day I might spring for a new 3D printer, or maybe even an Evil Mad Scientist AxiDraw pen plotter, and get back into some computational art. Today I'm remembering all the fun I had tinkering and messing around with this thing!
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