Man, it sounds like you’d be an awesome addition to the community! Definitely approach it on your own terms, 3d printing can be as cheap or expensive a hobby as you make it (speaking as the owner of a Thessian Enser 3).
It’s incredibly powerful (and satisfying) to be able to fix the plastic bit of something and give it a new life rather than just throwing it away.
Kinda depends, if it’s a popular something, there’s usually a model online that someone else has been kind enough to share (generally on Printables and/ or Thingiverse). My most recent experience with that was the shift knob on my mixer cracked and fell off, a quick download, a few grams of filament, 20 minutes, a few persuading taps with a mallet, and everything was good to go.
Beyond that, it’s a bit of personal preference and a bit of you’re trying to do, something like a dial cluster in a car is going to be far more complex that something like a mounting bracket. The stuff I tend to fix/ replace tends to be fairly small, so personally, it’s a matter of sitting down with a pair of calipers to measure the object and replicate it in CAD (Autodesk got me young, so I’m on the Fusion 360 train at the moment). One of the most amazing things about 3d printers is that you can go from design to prototype extremely rapidly, which allows you to iterate the design and make it better each pass. Got a hole doesn’t quite line up, a wall that’s too long, an arm that doesn’t quite reach, etc? tweak it and try again. It’s a little bit of trial and error, but with experience it becomes more of a controlled process as you figure out what works and what doesn’t.
I don’t know about the original, but I rocked a Droid 4 for the longest time. It’s probably my all time favorite phone. I really miss how quickly I could type and the extra screen space I got from not needing the software keyboard.
I don’t know about making no sense, but photography, especially fim, has some fun phrases: subjects are lit up and shot. Afterwards, you go into a dark room and blow them up, burn them (if you don’t dodge), and stick them in an acid bath.
In reality, it’s lighting and taking a picture, projecting it onto photo paper, basic edits (darkening/ lightening specific areas), and processing the photo paper.
Agreed! I had a math professor once say that epiphanies usually happen in one of the three B’s: Bed, Bathroom, and Bus. There really is something magical about stepping away to let your brain chew on a problem.