New toy printer. Coolest thing ever

I bought my wife a birthday present last year (which arrived in early March). Sadly, with the whole looking for a house, packing, moving, cleaning the first house, selling, working, and general chaos, the printer didn't get unpacked until a couple of weeks ago. 

...and for the record, I did not buy it at Sharper Image. 

But I bet they'll be selling Makerbots there in a couple of years. 

This is a rather nicely prebuilt 3D printer, although this early 2012 model is based on a wooden frame. It prints from reels of ABS or PLA plastic, which cost about $32 / kg. Given that the prints are often somewhat hollow, the filament rolls go a long way. 

It is also still moderately technical to run one of these. Basic setup involves coating the aluminum build plate with the included roll of Kapton tape, and several passes of leveling the build plate to get the actual plastic extrusion nozzle at the correct gap distance. 

Then to really get prints working, you gradually learn to tweak the build plate and nozzle temperature settings, choose your options for the slicer that actually converts the 3D models to mechanical motions of the printer, and how the slicer deals with rafts and the tearaway support structures. 

So...picture before I bore you to death. This includes an original green tree from The Battle of Stanrey. My Secret Satan was missing the trees. I found some close proxies and was able to match the rough size of the original trees. Took about 4 hours to print 20 trees. 

The dude up front is a 3D capture of a Dr. Lobo sculpture from The Agents of SMERSH game. Richard sculpted and painted one for Jason. So I grabbed my Iphone and used 123DCatch to generate a 3D capture of the sculpt. It lost some of the detail, but is a pretty good likeness for a few minutes work.

Now that I've got the basic use down, having this is slowly changing my perception of things. Sandi wants a very specific sturdy carrying case for her weird monocular eyeglass thingy. I just find one on the net, and resize it in a couple minutes, and print it overnight. 

The company that makes the cheaper spools of ABS I'm using requires you to use a special reel holder to work with most 3D printers. They just distribute the files. 

Currently, the printers are just a little too hard to use, and just a touch expensive for everyone. But I've seen a fully built printer for $600 recently that can turn out decent prints. Which is half what I paid for this beast less than a year ago. It still suffers from the need to understand and maintain what amounts to a small robot, but there are some sub $1500 printers that are very much aimed for the less technically-inclined user. 

But my question is, if you had one of these, what would you do with it?