2023 Beginners Guide to 3d Printing

hello this is Irv Shapiro with the make with tech Channel and today we're going to present a video that's quite exciting because it targets a number of different audiences if you're brand new to 3D printing or you're thinking about getting into 3D printing this is a video you should watch because I'll cover a lot of the basics you need to know to select your first 3D printer if you're more experienced with 3D printing but you're thinking of upgrading your printer you'll find this interesting if you've only used basic fdm 3D printers and you want to learn about the other Technologies there's something in this video for you also so let me first show you what I'm going to talk about in this video so you'll get an idea of what's included and there are chapter markers on the bottom of the video that you can use to navigate to these various topics as you can see on this screen I'm going to talk about some basic questions that I have a point of view on I've been doing this for almost five years now I've reviewed many many 3D printers produced over 250 videos so I've learned a lot about what works for people and what doesn't and I'm going to share those perspectives with you in this video so here are some of the questions we're going to cover should you buy an assembled 3D printer or a kit Bowden or direct drive what about Auto bed leveling does it really work 8-bit or 32-bit do you need multiple colors should you always buy a bigger 3D printer or do you really not need a very big 3D printer there are a lot of them that tend to be the same size what about open source software is that important how do you pick a slicer is a filament out sensor worth the extra money if you have to go to a different printer because of it what about all metal hot ends is Wi-Fi support useful and if you don't have it can you add it later and how do you pick your vendor should you buy from prusa from creality from anet from FL Sun from civil how do you pick your first 3D printer so stay tuned and let's learn something together foreign I'd like to begin by thanking all of the subscribers at models.akatech.com that helps us support this channel the make with Tech Community at forum.makewoodtech.com the makotech blog at make with tech.com models.micotech.com is a unique place to go for models to print on your 3D printer unlike thingiverse or printables or creality cloud or my mini Factory instead of selecting a ready to print model you select a template then you put in parameters right online to customize that model so it's yours special just for your print let me begin with a statement that might seem bold 3D printing is revolutionizing manufacturing in reality it's an understatement 3D printing is revolutionizing many things in the world around us if you look at this video here it's revolutionizing how we build homes it's revolutionizing health care and Medicine in fact today if you go to the dentist for a new crown that Crown is likely printed on a 3D printer what's even more surprising really remarkable is that while the Technologies used in industrial manufacturing are impressive it's even more impressive that for a couple hundred bucks maybe 250 bucks for this particular printer sitting next to me you can use it to 3D print objects for home that this manufacturing technology that is revolutionizing the world around us is available to you and I just using slightly different materials and we're going to learn about all of that today historically manufacturing consisted of assembling parts cutting Lumber nailing or screwing or gluing it together forging metal welding it together these were human-centric processes processes that had lots of Hands-On activity they took a lot of time they required very Advanced skills many of the early manufacturing processes involved creating molds and then pouring materials into them but the molds were still created by hand later technologies that use computers to control spinning bits were used take solid blocks of material and carve things out of them many aluminum parts as an example metal parts wood parts are still made that way today but 3D printing is different it's different because it doesn't subtract things it doesn't assemble things instead additive manufacturing the technical term for 3D printing builds things up layer by layer it's very much like building a house where you put down a layer of bricks then another layer on top then another layer on top this allows us to create unique items that would be more difficult to produce using other processes now I like to think about 3D printing as falling into three General types of machines the most common machine you'll find at home is a filament based 3D printer an fdm 3D printer which extrudes filament from a nozzle that comes off a reel now in fact these extruder based 3D printers can be used to extrude many things we saw a video just a moment ago about a 3D printer extruding concrete there are 3D printers that extrude chocolate or cookie dough so that you can 3D print goodies for your family so extruder based 3D printers are a relatively Simple Technology they can be manufactured for just a couple hundred dollars and they have another characteristic that's interesting and that is it is safe to handle the materials the Plastics that come on a reel are not caustic you don't need gloves however just like any process that heats up a material and in these cases we heat up the filament we extrude it from a nozzle they create fumes that's why in your kitchen it smells good when you're cooking and baking if you're printing with one of the most common filaments called pla it's generally recognized as safe there are other materials like ABS where you need pretty good ventilation to use them in general when using any manufacturing process woodworking 3D printing welding you should have good ventilation now the next type of 3D printer that I often talk about are resin based or in some cases powder based 3D printing these work in a very different way where there's a container of material and a technology used to selectively Harden layers at a time on that material we'll look at that in more detail and then finally there are jetting style 3D printing manufacturing capabilities and those were not going to really cover today they're very expensive machines fifty thousand hundred thousand dollars or more they're used in industrial processes processes that can 3D print layer at a time metals they require extensive post processing so after you 3D print your object you put it into an oven and that oven melts off the support structures and melts together the metal so you end up with absolutely a solid object and these metal objects are using everything from automobiles to rocket ships so let's cover a little more detail the first two categories because they're more likely to be the style of 3D printers you'd use as a hobbyist or a small business let's look at this slide fdm stands for fused deposition modeling and as I indicated you take a filament that's the green here it goes through a heater block that's an element that gets to between 200 and 300 degrees Celsius that melts that filament so it can then be ejected out of extruded is a better term out of a nozzle nozzles are often brass in the low end printers they may be hardened steel or other materials in high-end printers now this process is in fact really just a computer controlling something that looks like a hot glue gun but instead of a stick of glue that you extrude by pulling a trigger step by step and then you could wait for a layer to dry or Harden you could move up and extrude another layer this is all being done by a computer so fdm printing is the most common and I'm going to skip to the conclusion I recommend fdm printers for most people starting out in 3D printing now next I'd like to cover resin based 3D printers these are also available to Consumers to hobbyists they're generally a bit more expensive let's say instead of starting at 200 250 dollars they say 300 350 or more however there's a big gotcha instead of the material coming on a reel and being safe to touch the material comes in an opaque bottle and on that bottle is a warning that says wear gloves and mask when using keep away from children and dust this material is a bit caustic it will irritate your skin the fumes will irritate your lungs so you need to use it very very carefully in particular for me the requirement to always wear gloves with these printers just make them less fun to use the advantages of resin based printers is they print finer details more accurately and when printing fine details they're faster the disadvantages generally their print volume is smaller so you see resin based 3D printers printing things like crowns for teeth molds for jewelry or even jewelry itself let's look at the process in this picture a little bit so you have a vat of resin you lower a build plate into the vat the bottom of the vat is clear if you want the layer height because we're putting in layers if you want the layer height to be 0.2 millimeters a typical layer height you lower the build plate to within 0.2 millimeters of the bottom of the clear vat then you shine a UV light through the bottom that's selectively hardens that filament we can see here a picture of a resin based printer operating and you'll see the object going down into the resin being pulled up going down a little bit being pulled up being printed upside down okay so you've decided whether you're going to start with a resin based printer or an fdm printer and as I indicated I recommend fdm what are the steps you need to actually produce a print how do you get from a picture on a computer screen to this print let's look at this slide together so first you need to obtain a 3D model you could create that from scratch in a program like Fusion 360 or free CAD or even tinkercad a very easy to use program for Designing 3D objects that's taught to kids in elementary school or you could go to a site like thingiverse or printables or creality cloud or my mini Factory and you could download a object that somebody else designed there's a third alternative now you can go to models.makewood tech.com you can start with a template for an object and then you can manipulate it you can change it and see it on screen so you get exactly what you're looking for now once you have that object you'll save it in a number of different formats potentially the most common is called STL but an STL object is a three-dimensional object this device or even the resin based printer needs to print a layer at a time so how do you create layers well let's say you had a loaf of bread what do you want to do to cut that loaf of bread up into pieces you can use for a sandwich you slice it so you're going to use a slicer to take your three-dimensional object and divide it into layers there are many different slicers available in general I recommend you start with the slicer that's recommended by the manufacturer of your 3D printer so you start with a 3D object you've designed it yourself you've downloaded it from a site you've manipulated it models.makewittech.com you've sliced it you go from an STL file to a G-Code file now G-Code is a set of instructions for telling a machine how to move a head an action component right and left that's the x-axis back and forth that's the y-axis or up and down that's the z-axis and in fact for advanced machines even on angles that's what G-Code is instead of instructions you take that G-Code file and you need to get it to your printer now you could use Wi-Fi you could use the cloud I often just use sneakernet what's sneakernet well you save the file onto an SD card that's the right format for your 3D printer and you walk it over to the 3D printer you put it into the 3D printer you go to the front panel on the 3D printer and you press the print button that's sneakernet now in this part of the video I'm going to focus on fdm 3D printers specifically fdm 3D printers for hobbyists for home use or potentially for small business the first question is should you buy a 3D printer that's fully assembled or a kit well first let me tell you a secret manufacturers overseas do not ship 3D printers as kits to save on labor costs the most expensive component of a 3D printer in many cases is shipping and shipping overseas is done by volume so if it's bigger it costs more so if you can put it flat in a smaller box it's less expensive to ship so that's why originally all of the 3D printers were shipped as kits not all kits are the same today many of the kids come 70 80 90 assembled and what you're basically doing is taking a base taking this Gantry that includes the components we'll talk about in a moment putting it onto the base and putting some bolts in to assemble it then you're plugging in a couple cables so it all works if you've assembled Ikea furniture you can do that I like to start with that style of printer because you learn just a little bit about the parts and it's still not going to turn you off to 3D printing okay let's take a look at the parts of an fdm printer so the idea is you need to print in layers in order to print layers you need to move the printhead this mechanism here back and forth up and back up and down this is the x-axis the y-axis the z-axis to move the printhead side by side on the x-axis you have a motor on the side here that pulls a belt and moves this printhead in this direction the overall Gantry goes up and down that's the z-axis that is driven by a geared Rod here on the side let me turn this just a little bit so you can see that see the geared Rod here on the side and the whole print bed moves back and forth to manipulate the y-axis because the print pen moves back and forth some people call these bed Slingers I think that's a very cute term now in order to get the filament from the reel on the top to the nozzle there's a geared motor on the side here that's called your extruder and I'll show you a picture of that here the extruder pulls the filament off the Reel and pushes it through this tube called the Bowden tube there are no geared mechanisms in this assembly which is called the hot end assembly that actually pull the filament instead the filament is pushed from here over this tube to here that means that this mechanism can be very lightweight so you don't need powerful motors to move it back and forth and when it starts and stops there won't be too much inertia it won't cause too much vibration but it means you're pushing the filament instead of pulling it we'll talk about that in a moment once you push the filament to here it enters a heating element that melts it so it will extrude out the nozzle at the bottom now there's an alternative to this Bowden setup and the disadvantage of the Bowden setup is that there's a lot of play you're pushing the filament and sometimes you want to pull the filament back that's called retraction you do that to reduce the pressure of the filament on the nozzle if there's less pressure when you go to move the nozzle and you don't want to extrude to go from maybe here to here and start printing again you don't want filament to drip out filament dripping out will cause stringing now let's look at this picture together on the left hand side you'll see the Bowden tube set up with the yellow line being the Bowden tube on the right hand side you'll see an alternative setup where instead of the motorized mechanism that moves the filament being back here it's right here on top of this hot end that means that this hot end is going to be heavier you need more engineering to move it reliably but in fact you can control the filament movement better that's called a direct extruder now this next picture shows you what's inside here what's inside here are a couple of areas you have the nozzle on the bottom on top of that you have a heating cartridge and a heating element that melts the filament you have a thermistor which is a mechanism that senses the temperature because you need it to precisely be let's say somewhere between 200 degrees and 300 degrees Celsius but then on top of that hot area you need a cool area because you don't want your filament melting inside the Bowden tube that'd make a mess even though these belt Bowden tubes are made from a teflon-like plastic so that they're very slippery you want the filament to be cool up here so you have a fan on the side blowing into a set of heat fins to cool down that filament now on the left hand side you'll see this style of hotend where the tube actually goes all the way down to the nozzle now in fact that can be the case for both direct extruder and Bowden tube the advantage of that is tend not to jam very often because there's no break between where the filament comes in and the nozzle an alternative is an all metal hotend you'll see a picture of that on the right in that case the tubing inside is made of metal the advantage is you can go to higher temperatures this style of tubing is not considered safe to use above about 230 235 degrees Celsius maybe you can push it a little bit above that and the reason is this tubing when it heats up will also give off Vapors or gases and it will begin to get softer so to go above about 230 degrees you want on all metal hot end what's the disadvantage all metal hot ends tend to drip filament a little bit more so you get more stringing on your prints so for most consumers I would recommend today you start with a direct extruder because they're available at a lower cost today but with a traditional hot end if you need higher temperature prints you go with a direct extruder with an all-metal hot end one of the most important things you have to do in order to successfully use a 3D printer is ensure that the nozzle is a consistent distance from the print bed at every point every Point possible now classically the way you do that on low end consumer grade printers is by adjusting the corners of the print bed but we need to think about the fact that a print bed is a sheet of material so if I pull this corner down this corner is going to go up and vice versa so when you adjust those Corners you need to go around and adjust them multiple times you can see here in this picture that they're often large knobs under the corners of your printer or in some cases there may actually be screws on the top used to manually adjust that in fact for most entry-level printers manually adjusting your print bed is just fine you just need to take the time and have the patience to do it properly unless the temperature in your room changes a lot it's probably not going to go out of adjustment very often the other thing you need to do along with adjusting it to make sure it's level and there are many good videos on this channel about how to do that is ensure that the distance from the nozzle to the print surface is correct that distance should be about the thickness of of a piece of paper I like to actually use Post-it notes that's called adjusting the Z offset so when you see people talk about the Z offset it technically refers to something a little different but it's often used to indicate the distance between the nozzle in the printer now let's take a look at Auto bed leveling you can see here on this slide that auto bed leveling sensors come in a variety of Technologies there are capacitor sensors inductive sensors and bl touch style sensors in BL touch style sensors this is a BL touch there's actually a little pin on the end that is pressed in when the sensor makes contact with the print surface as it's a physical style sensor the probe at least is physical it will work with any style of print bed the other styles of sensors in particular the prusa style inductive sensors require a metal print bed so you need to be careful if you want to potentially change your print surface from a spring steel or metal print surface maybe the glass or Garo light if you're printing nylon then you're going to want to have a sensor that has a physical probe I've tried all three in general I tend to like the BL touch style sensor on this Ender 3 version 2 I put an aftermarket BL touch sensor onto the machine now what the Marlin firmware or a Clipper fuse in Clipper firmware will do is probe your bed at a number of locations creating a grid or a matrix of distances distances from a known distance where the nozzle would be to the bed then when it goes to print it will add or subtract that distance as appropriate from the height it uses above the print surface to ensure your layer is consistent so if you set your layer to 0.2 millimeters it will ensure there's 0.2 millimeters to the actual physical bed as probed Auto bed leveling does not level your bed it's a terrible term it adjusts the distance to accommodate imperfections in the leveling of the bed is this a good thing yeah it's a very good thing however for most beginners starting with 3D printers the manual adjustment of the bed is probably just fine and you won't have to do it very often and you should know how to do it anyways because even if you have a BL touch if you have springs on the corners as the temperature changes those Springs are going to expand and contract a little you still should probably manually readjust and only leave your auto bed leveling for fine adjustments this is a control board from a creality printer now on this control board there are a variety of things they're under these heat sinks are chips that control these stepper Motors that provide the movement and this big ship here is the central processing unit now historically inexpensive 3D printers used 8-bit processing units today most 3D printers use 32-bit processing units that's sort of like saying the difference between a V4 V6 and a V8 or a V12 engine today there's no reason to buy a 3D printer that doesn't have a 32-bit control board because the costs have dropped and 8-bit control boards limit the sophistication of the firmware firmware being software that runs inside a machine the firmware that controls your 3D printer now what about the screen I don't think it matters I don't think it matters whether you have a knob to adjust the screen or it's a touch screen as long as it's responsive and the printer manufacturers made it clear and even easy to use in fact I don't even think it matters whether it's in color or in black and white single color monochrome I think the information they provide on it is more important and if they're using modern firmware Marlin version 2 current version of clipper the likelihood is it will have good information so I probably wouldn't select a printer based on the screen now let's talk about print surfaces let me get some over here so print surfaces come in a variety of materials this happens to be a spring steel print surface that's coated in PEI Pei is a coating that works really well but it's more expensive so you generally only see it on the higher end printers I like spring steel print surfaces because once your surface is cooled you can just bend it a little bit and your print will pop right off now the key there is once it's cooled people run into all sorts of trouble trying to remove things from print beds when they're not cool your print bed has to be below about 20 degrees Celsius for the materials to come off so trying to scrape it off with a paint scraper is a bad idea just cool it down now if something's really stuck and if you have a removable print surface which is a big plus take the whole item and stick it in your freezer yeah I'm not joking sticking in your freezer for a minute or alternatively take a little fan and blow the fan on it for a few minutes when it cools down most prints will come off easily but I do like spring seal now you'll notice on the back of this print surface is blue painters tape why well I was using this print surface with a printer printing nylon nylon is very hard to use it's hard to get it to print stick and printing on blue painters tape is a wonderful trick so if you're having trouble getting a princess stick try putting some blue painters tape down there are other are other types of print services this happens to be glass with a coating that's one type some people like those and this is a special material called garrelite which is very very good for printing nylon however in general as long as the print surface is removable I don't really care that much which surface they use I like spring steel where it's flexible but there's another trick you can use to get things to stick all the time and that is just use a print surface adhesive two adhesives that I really like are dimaflex and magigoo I use them both I tend to use the dimifix a bit more but they both work very well some people like using a regular glue stick that's never worked well for me now a glue stick on top of blue painters tape does work very very well or the z-axis on a printer is often controlled by a rod a threaded rod on a motor some printers have two one on each side is that better yeah it's better but unless you're using your 3D printer professionally and you need really good Precision or you're trying to print at very very high speeds I haven't seen dramatic differences in quality between a single z-axis and a dual z-axis dual z-axis theoretically is always better I just haven't seen the difference in my printers on this slide we see Stu two different styles of printers they happen to both be from reality but these two different styles are available from a variety of Manufacturers one is the bedslinger where the print bed controls the y-axis back and forth the other is the Ender 5 style where the print bed actually moves up and down so the print bed is controlling your z-axis the Box style Ender 5 to me aesthetically seems like a better design and I am a big fan of Ender 5 and the new Ender 5 S1 printers and in fact another printer with that style of print bed was the Monoprice ultimate 2. now that printer is no longer current I wouldn't buy one today but that printer I really loved that printer so I like the Box style printers with the print bed moving up and down once again though for most things that I print I can't tell the difference in the quality between a bed Slinger and a print ER where the print bed moves up and down now I'm going to cover a controversial topic fully enclosed printers fully enclosed printers are good for a couple reasons one is theoretically you can control the temperature but only if they have the right fans and the right type of heating elements in the enclosure number two they're safer little fingers your cat can't get into that printer while it's printing but I don't like them for most entry-level printers hobbyists and small businesses why they're just harder to maintain it's harder to get to the things that you need to adjust 3D printers have belts and they have gears and they have wheels they're all gonna need adjustment yes you're gonna need to adjust these things on your 3D printer and so if it's enclosed in a complex enclosure in particular enclosure that's hard to get open it's going to make it much harder to maintain that printer so I for most use cases consumer use cases I prefer a printer that's not fully enclosed now let's go back to our list and I'll finish up those items that I haven't covered already and very quickly review the items I have covered assembled versus kit I prefer a mostly assembled kit Bowden versus direct drive nowadays if you can afford a direct drive printer go with direct drive do you need Auto bed leveling no it's nice to have and it is included on a lot of printers that sell for about three hundred dollars or so today 32-bit versus 8-bit only by 32-bit do you need a multi-color printer well it's really a lot of fun to print something like this but it's a lot of fun it doesn't really add a lot of value the value of a multi-filament now I'm saying multi-filament not in multi-color printer is you can use dissolvable support when you're printing things where there are structures that require a bridge an area without filament under it one way to ensure they print perfectly is to print a structure under it that you're going to remove later that structure is called a support now you can remove them by pulling them off by cutting them off by sanding them off or you can print that structure in a second material called dissolvable support material if you print in a dissolvable support material you take your whole print you put it in a vat of warm water and the supports dissolve professional style printers often use dissolvable supports for mechanically complex parts but if you're printing at home regular supports are fine so for printing at home I do not recommend purchasing a multi-color printer this was printed on a JG maker idex printer that stands for independent dual extruder it was a really lot of fun to work with but there were two extruders two things to us adjust you had to calibrate the height of the two extruders to make sure they were the same it was complex or more complex to set up it's more complex to support and maintain so unless you're going to go with a very high-end dual extruder printer where those things are all automated I would stay with a single color printer next is bigger always better well 90 of the things that I print on a 3D printer are the size of a basketball or smaller whether they're functional princesses a iPad stand this is a pipe adapter for a vacuum cleaner or their toys for my grandchildren ninety percent of them fit in the side an area the size of a basketball most entry-level 3D printers many most as a wrong term many entry-level 3D printers have a print area of about 230 by 230 by about 2 40 or 250. that's more than sufficient for ninety percent of the things that I print in unique cases maybe if you're making full-size face masks for costumes or you're printing architectural renderings or you need large mechanical Parts you'll want something bigger those are all special cases so bigger is not better 200 by 200 by 200 I wouldn't go below that but anything above that is generally fine I think for most common use cases now you'll hear a lot of people talk about the importance of Open Source software I understand completely where they're coming from in fact I use a lot of Open Source software and various businesses I'm involved in I support the open source Community I send them money for various projects I participate in open source projects but for most consumers for most hobbyists I don't think it matters if the software in your 3D printer is proprietary or open source there's software in your refrigerator their software in your car their software in your phone none of them are open source now the issue does get more complicated when a manufacturer includes open source software in their product but then does not make it open source I'll leave that to the lawyers but for most people I don't think it matters if the firmware the software inside your printer is proprietary or open source the filament comes off a reel goes through the extruder what if the filament runs out in the middle of a print well there are things called filament out sensors on entry-level printers they really don't work and I'll tell you why they will stop the printer when it runs out of filament but then you're somewhere in the middle of a layer when you load a new filament you restart it it goes back to the beginning of the layer and prints again so some portion of that layer is going to get a double count a double surface of filament you're going to be able to see that in perfection we talked about all metal hot ends for beginners I don't recommend them if you're printing in special materials you need them what about Wi-Fi support well I spoke to you about sneakernet where you take your 3D print you put it on SD card you walk it over your printer for most people I think that's fine if you want to add Wi-Fi support to an existing printer there are a number of ways to do it you can do it with a Raspberry Pi and open something called octoprint there are boxes made by manufacturers like creality that'll add Wi-Fi to their printers I don't think it's a showstopper I wouldn't make my selection based on whether the printer had Wi-Fi the most important question might be the last one how do you pick well the first thing you should do is watch lots of videos look at the reviews the second thing you should do is almost every printer manufacturer today has a Facebook page go to the Facebook page and read all of the comments do people get support from the vendor is it easy to get parts you want to check to see if the printer manufacturer has a parts store that you can order parts from for the country you're living in so all of these things taken together should help you select the right 3D printer well folks I hope you enjoyed this video I didn't make a recommendation of a 3D printer I use printers from a variety of Brands my favorites right now happen to be from creality and FL Sun but they're new printers in the market all of the time if you like this video give me a thumbs up please recommend it to folks thinking about buying 3D printers feel free to repost links to this video anywhere you would like go to models.nicotech.com to support the channel and to download customizable models and let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 23,703

Keywords: 3d printer, 3d printers, 3d printing, 3d printing nerd, 3d printing videos, 3d printing videos youtube, what is 3d printing technology, creality ender 3, 3d printing for beginners, what is 3d printing?, How do 3d printers work?, 3d printing a house, best 3d printer, 3d printed, best 3d printer 2023, 3d print, best 3d printers, 3d printer review, best fdm 3d printer, best resin 3d printer, 3d printer 2023, beginners guide to 3d printing, best 3d printer for beginners

Id: 9_W74gc8yL0

Length: 44min 27sec (2667 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 26 2023