3D printing for everyone!

Over 2 years ago, right here on this blog, I posed the question: how, if you aren't a K-12 student or in University, does someone print in 3D? Back then, I explored:

Big Box resources: Staples will print for you, but required a $150 minimum per request!
Sculpteo: a printing vendor associated to Thingiverse, seemed to have reasonable prices, and going with a basic, no frills design like the SEP medal (3" diameter with logo in middle), I believe the price ran ~$10 before shipping. Pricey, considering project size and usefulness, though.
Personal 3D printers: Checking just now, I see an XYZ da vinci persona printer for $169 (non heating printing bed and PLA only filament are issues, though - prints will slide and warp during a job, and PLA is soft and will gum up extruder and limit the type of project depending on its intended use post print)! But, not a lot of hype these days as holiday gifts, and in the 2016 SEP series I taught, we learned the liabilities that even high quality 3D printers at UVa posed for even our simple SEP medal project (warping on an open printing beds as your project cools once produced from the hot extruder arm).

Back then, as well, I learned the Charlottesville JMRL library at the Northside Branch, acquired a printer. But when I contacted them in 2016, it seemed it would take time for them to get their program going. But now, "going" it seems to be! Check out these details from their recent Facebook post. Digging deeper, I find their rules of use, which in general seem to require:

A library card and scheduling of the printing room
8 hours max use per month that does not roll over month to month
Projects are subject to staff review and approval and can't violate intellectual property protection
Printing is free for now, but this may change in future
Library staff handling the actual printing job (it is queued up)

I will check it out over the winter and report back what the experience was like. What I'd caution:

8 hrs is not much time for a project print; the SEP medal project on a high quality 3D printer took 1 hour for the 3" disc! And I would be curious what the 8 hrs includes, such as staff review time of the  project to approve it, address fails, etc. And it concerns me that their media release contains a fairly complex project, a bust of Voltaire, that I'm sure would take more than 8 hrs to print. I found when I taught 3D printing, one of the biggest challenges wasn't in teaching design or scripting, but in managing user and parent expectations!

Intellectual property protection: What does this mean? The JMRL media mentions the Voltaire bust design came from Thingiverse, but as we learned in our 2016 SEP class, Thingiverse has no intellectual property policy, except that if you post your design, it will be used by EVERYONE. And no guarantee that designs you grab from it can be handled by each and every printer or are even design sound enough to successfully print.

That JMRL handles the actual print job, means that you don't get to see how the process works start to finish, which in and of itself, is an incredible learning experience.