I've been into 3D printing for the last 5 years or so. I found myself watching Jerry Berg's videos on YouTube and thought it looked pretty cool. So I bought myself an Ultimaker Original+ in kit form. Which suited on two fronts, I love building kits and being an Ultimaker I was fairly sure it wasn't going to be trash.

That printer spent about 18 months living on the kitchen table, and I spent a lot of time trawling Thingiverse to find things to make. I realised quite quickly the attraction of printing Benchy's on demand gets old pretty quickly, and I found most of my printing was for prototyping. brackets, electronics project enclosures etc.

After a couple of years I had some spare cash, so I upgraded to an Ultimaker 3 Extended and a Form 2. The 3E is absolutely bombproof, it truly is a fire and forget type machine. You hit print and walk away. No babysitting required and with the dual extruders, I can use dissolvable and breakaway materials with ease, or print with two colours (which I don't bother with most of the time). The Form, on the other hand is great for high resolution stuff. But it's fiddly and messy, so it's had much less use. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, I probably wouldn't have bothered getting it.

I did consider getting a cheap direct drive FDM (the Ultimaker's are bowden tube) for flexible filament, haven't bothered so far. There was a guy selling a direct drive mod for the UMO+, but he dicked me about for months on delivery, so I cancelled. So I did think about getting a Prusa, but I don't currently have the time or the space.

On the software side Cura and PreForm have always performed well, I did get copy of Simplify3D thinking I needed the extra features, but it never seemed to generate gcode that worked well on the UMO, so I've not used it for a while.

As far as CAD software goes, I liked TinkerCAD, but ended up getting sucked into the Fusion360 world. This, combined with my love of the Eagle PCB software means I've just forked over for 3 years of subscription to Autodesk for the pair.

I've just finished printing a bunch of router templates for hinges and locks/handles for the new doors I'm about to install in the house. Plus a new router baseplate to accept screw in metal template bushings. To me, that's a great example of what 3D printing is good for.