Would a 3d printer work for me ?

[hiddeninsite]

When you search a 3D Print who is cheap and just to try out first things, I can show you a good oportunity:
The Wanhao Duplicator i3 costs 495 euro and works perfectly!
Here the link:
http://3dmarkt.at/en/3D-Printer/Wanh...D-Printer.html

I'm prepared to pay for good results , cheap isn't important

[curious aardvark]

dependignon your budget you would probably benefit from a multi material printer like the hyrel.
It can print in plastic, extruded clay and silicon and pretty much anything else that can be extruded.
http://www.hyrel3d.com/

And yep the easy part of the box is the squashed sphere. IN openscad it'd take a couple of lines of instructions to do that.
Designed right you could actually print the hinges already in place.
If you use a dual material printer you can simply print a join between the two halves with flexible filament.

Printer wise - many many choices. Give us a rough budget and we'll give you a list :-)

But none of it will be super fast to learn.

[Clutch57]

"How easy is Cad to learn"? Unless you own CAD already, I would suggest a free version or even Sketchup to learn how to model. I have no training except for what I have learned on line with all the free tutorials out there and this would be easy to produce in one of the free versions.

[curious aardvark]

if you've never done any cad - then absolutely start with openscad. It's the only one where you'll have a printable object in 5 minutes.
Most cad programs require a lot of farting about before you've got something you can actually print. Openscad ONLY makes printable objects.
No drawing - you just tell it what you want and it makes it :-)
http://www.openscad.org/

The online manual was most likely written by some kind of idiot savant - it's basically gibberish and almost impossible to understan by a 'normal' person'.
Fortunately there are lots of simple to follow tutorials online.

http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/OpenS...l#Introduction
http://blog.cubehero.com/2013/11/19/...s-in-openscad/

My openscad tip of the day: when making spheres or cylinders use 'd=' to state the diameter rather than 'r=' forthe radius. saves you having to constantly have to calculate the final size of something from a radius - just state the actual size you want as a diameter :-)
Why people still use r, I don't know.
Or why people put the modules AFTER the actual model script. back to front to me.
But I'm not a programmer :-)
It probably all makes sense to whoever wrote the manual.

Sketchup is a right bastard to make printable objects in. And - in my experience, the version you have is almost never the version in a tutorial so nothing ever works properly.