I saw this online but haven’t visited. Home - White Bear Makerspace
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Thanks! The prices are a little tough on a fixed income.
It does look like their prices have gone up since last I checked. I’m not sure how the memberships work but it seems like $60 gets ‘digital’ access which includes 3D printing. Might be a good fit for some people.
If you’re the type of person that can build things quickly in SU, having a 3D printer is MAGICAL. It takes your stuff off the screen and into Real Life and it’s so much more fun to me personally when the final output is a physical thing.
The downside is that SU isn’t really the greatest tool for 3D print design and you’ll very quickly start bumping up against limitations around minimum sizes and keeping things solid.
To provide a concrete example: here’s a thing I designed in SU, printed, threw in a servo and microcontroller, and now it controls my shop exhaust vent: Iris Exhaust Vent - YouTube
For most people, the major limiting factor in 3D printing is learning the CAD tools. Folks reading this should already have a leg up on new users of 3D printers on account of having the hard part already handled!
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Funny. I don’t have that problem at all, even with very highly detailed models.
My major problem is curved surfaces. If you leave the defaults in SU for segment count, the blocky curves show up in the print and it looks terrible. If instead you crank up the segments so that it prints nice, SU runs into problems with minimum segment size. My typical fix is to crank everything up by 1000, model things such that 1m in SU == 1mm in the output.
Even then I still occasionally run into these problems with small circles w/ large segment counts.
Solidity is similar, the second a couple curves intersect with small dimensions and large segment counts, things quickly become unsolid leaving one to chase down what happened via inspection tools. It’s not a complete show-stopper, but it is something that you’d never have to deal with if you chose a solid modeling tool from the get-go.
I learned SU many years ago, so it’s what I’ve learned to press-gang into 3D print use. As someone who has done pretty extensive design work for 3D print over the years, and who has published a few number of widely-used models… It’s not the best tool for the job. It’s what I use because it’s what I know.
Here’s a quick example from a model I made the other day.
I guess I don’t have any problems with getting solids in SketchUp. Every single component in every model I’ve shown in this thread is solid/manifold.
Different strokes I guess.
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Small circles don’t need an excessive segment count!
A segment length of 1mm is usually small enough to be not noticable…
Off course this depends on your printers resolution
Started another one during the night.
When it’s finished it should look something like this:
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Looking good as always! But starting to worry about your lack of sleep! 
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I’ll sleep when I’m done.
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I think he has his days and nights mixed up
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More to do.
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Almost finished. Just a few parts left for the steam valve which you can’t see here anyway.
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Excellent ! Great style on this image. Curious just how big is this model ?
Thank you! Big how? File size? 25.7Mb.
Was wondering the general dimensions of the engine ?
Ah, I see. As a model engine it’s kind of small. Overall it’s 335mm x 590mm x 732mm
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Was sort of hoping you were modeling at gargantuan size… 