Anyone into 3D printing?

[Gruff]

I worked for over a decade at Precision Cast Parts Corp in portland. The casting technique described is the "Lost Chinese wax casting" method. We used it for all our castings. You can get very precise clean product with it. For iron based alloys you need a first coating of a ceramic slurry that is usually an industry secret. This coating allows the finished surface to be smooth and free of defects.

Regarding SketchUp:

I have a long work history of using wireframe and Solidmodeling products.
I froze my SketchUp at version 8.0 where it was still owned by Google.
The current owner (Trimble) does not offer the fully free product anymore (As far as I know.)

SketchUp is by far the easiest Solidmodeler for beginners. It is also the most fun.
It has a very intuitive interface. Eight year old kids can start using it with very little instruction.

That said it has very little in the way of feedback prompts.
For instance you have to know that once you start to use a tool you can key in your dimensions.

For example: Click the rectangle surface icon. Click a point on the screen, drag, click an end point Then type in 12,12 <Enter> to define the X and Y size.
Start a line, select a direction and type in a distance. Hit <Enter> to define the line length.
Any closed loop of lines and arcs automatically form a surface. Grab the Push/Pull tool, click on a surface and drag then type in a distance <Enter> and the surface is extruded to the size you want. Welcome to 3D.

It does lack parametrics.
SketchUp is what the industry calls a dumb surface based solidmodeler.
You cannot change the size of the solid by entering new dimensions for existing features after they are created, however you can carve away or add geometry as needed.

One thing I will mention that is a pain for me (Coming from high end CAD) is that Arcs and Circles in SketchUp are not true curves.
They are groups of faceted lines.
You can control the granularity of the facets to some extent.

This can cause arc tangent issues if you are not careful.
This is normally not a problem if you are creating a visual image, but possibly an issue when generating 3D for Printing.

There was a ton of 3D party free tools before Trimble bought the product.
I do not know if they are still available.
Most notable among them for me was a free 3D fillet/Edge radius tool.

Sorry for being so long winded.
If anyone want some help with getting started I will create a new thread for that purpose.