3D printers designed to print PCB’s are 20 to 30 grand for the low end of the market - and I’ve heard good reports from the people using them. I’ve also worked on projects where there would be no way that the PCB’s could be 3D printed - 500+ components on ~2" by 7" board, though most were 0201 decoupling caps. Needless to say, this is out of the realm for electronics to be used on model railroads.
For home PCB work, a CNC router makes the most sense - though Digi-Key and others have reasonable prices for small runs of two or four layer PCB’s. I’ve got an idea for a project involving a Raspberry Pi Pico and T.I. DRV8816’s.
If you have better luck with “wire glue”, then it is a reasonable alternative to soldering. Soldering will most likely get you a connection with much lower resistance, but that may not be critical for what you are doing.
For the sizes of PCB’s I typically do, I can get PCB’s for peanuts. It takes a couple weeks to get them, but I recently ordered ten of these from https://www.seeedstudio.com/ and the total with shipping was $11, the board is roughly 3" x 3". Trying to kludge something like this with a 3D printer just doesn’t make much sense to me. By the time you sit down and carefully drill all the holes, etc., not to mention the dealing with the via’s, I just don’t see the point.
I think it has to do with the hobby. It’s a lot easier to buy a ready-built station for the layout, but many enjoy cutting out pieces, painting, etc., to get a scratch-built station.
I would guess there are modelers who would like the challenge of building their own PCBs.
When I was a kid, we took the challenge to build crystal radio sets. We had an old radio in the basement we listened to while we built our own radio, just for the enjoyment of doing it.
A very long time ago I used to do PCB’s the hard way. Of course, that was way before the nifty layout programs and the cheap and easy PCB fabrication houses existed. Nowadays, I enjoy designing and building custom electronics, but I’m not a masochist.
Yes, I was in grade school and building crystal radios on little cardboard boxes, they amazed other kids in my class.
