True. But what's the chance of getting the CAD file for in my
20 year old dishwasher? Or the 'funny clippy bit' on my bike? Call up the manufacturer and ask?CAD is the biggest problem IMHO. It's fine to design simple objects, but most of the things I want to build with a 3D printer aren't simple. The 'funny clippy bit' has a particular rounded shape in order to clip, and I can't just duplicate that with cubes and spheres and extruded outlines.
For 2D stuff I've had good results by flatbed scanning the thing I want it to mate with (eg the holes on a PCB) and dropping the output PDF (which is correctly scaled) into my design for laser cutting. But getting complex curved surfaces 3D scanned, and then turning them into printable meshes, is somewhat trickier.
Theo