3D Printing
Rediscovering Engineering Through 3D Printing
Author(s): Louis Ouellet
I didn’t buy a 3D printer to print toys. I bought it to prototype systems.
In early October, I added a BambuLab P1S to my lab. Most people start with a Benchy — a calibration cube, a cable clip, something small and forgiving. I opened FreeCAD and started designing a NAS enclosure from scratch.
Probably not the most subtle first print.
But I wasn’t interested in printing trinkets. I wanted constraints. I wanted tolerances. I wanted airflow questions, structural rigidity concerns, screw alignment problems, and the kind of iterative refinement that forces you to think before you click “print.” I wanted to push engineering muscles I hadn’t used since high school — the ones that make you consider load distribution, clearances, material thickness, and assembly order.
For years, most of what I build has been invisible: servers, scripts, infrastructure diagrams, automation pipelines. Systems that live in racks or in the cloud. With 3D printing, for the first time in a long time, I could design something in the morning and physically hold the result in the evening.
Something functional. Something structural. Something real.
That decision — to start with a NAS enclosure instead of a novelty print — set the tone for everything that followed.