3D Printing: 13 MORE Things I Wish I Knew: 2021 Update

hi there i'm nils and today we're going to be covering 13 more things i wish i had known before starting 3d printing welcome to the 3d printing zone and thanks for joining me today now if you haven't seen them already i've got a couple of other videos that you can check out called 13 things i wish i knew before starting 3d printing but those have been around for two or three years now and it's definitely time to do some updates because so much has changed in the 3d printing world in that time now to start us off with number 13 on our list is filament maintenance and this just means making sure that you're taking good care of your filament to keep it at the right dryness and the right moisture as well and also not letting it age for too long what can happen is over time these filaments can become very dry or brittle and there's a couple of ways we'll talk about to maintain them a little bit better but when they get old they do get brittle and they tend to snap in fact these are all pieces of filament that came off this roll right here and i found that when i tried printing with it it was just snapping as it was trying to go into the extruder so definitely not something that worked well and it's really easy just to snap pieces off like this and that's a sign that this thing is just too old and maybe time to retire this little bit of filament here and make sure to keep something new now to prevent that from happening there are products out there to help with that there are filament dehumidifiers and dryers you can i like to buy these bags here that are really simple you can take a couple of packs of these silica gel packs that basically absorb the moisture that's around them and i love that they all say do not eat like i don't know if somebody's been chugging these things down or what but take a couple of those you can buy these bags i'll put links to everything that i talked about in the description below so if there's anything you want to see check out the links down there and that helps my channel out but will also get you directly to the products that were mentioned here so you throw a couple of these in here put your spool in there seal it up and i like to get a little bit of the air out of there before i seal it and then store this away and you're good to go and this will help this school of filament to last much much longer tip number 12 is usually the problem is not the filament it's usually your settings so in most cases i found that there are no real problem child filaments that i've worked with almost every time i've discovered that it's my settings or my calibration of the printer that has been the problem now there may be some problem child brands or some problem child types of filament out there and if you're aware of those leave those in the comments below because we love to hear from you and kind of understand what pitfalls to watch out for that said like i say in my experience just about every time i found that it's been me it's some setting that i didn't get quite right or i didn't understand the temperatures that it needed the speed different things like that now a couple of years ago basically you had two main options for printing or maybe three or four years ago you had pla which was used for pretty much everything and abs abs is really finicky to work with you have to have an enclosure typically in order to get a successful print everything prints a little bit hotter with it and so it's a little more challenging to work with and to get a successful print pla is really easy to work with very forgiving but it doesn't have some of the same characteristics as abs so along came petg this stuff in the middle here petg is kind of a best of both worlds thing you do print it a little bit hotter typically and it's almost as easy to print as pla but has a lot of the same strength and characteristics as abs so definitely something you want to check out but nowadays you've got epla and super pla and stpla you've got carbon fiber polycarbonates and all kinds of other filaments that you can check out so do your homework see what's out there but for the most part check yourself and your own settings before you blame it on the filament because there's a good chance that it will print just fine with some adjustments now one last note on that i find that for most things that i print pla is really where it's at it's still the easiest one to print for me the settings are pretty forgiving as far as the temperatures of the bed and even the range of temperatures on the hot end it can work really well just about every time so i use that for still almost every single print probably 95 out of 100 prints i'm using that and if there's something that i have a specific use case for there are other materials like the flexible stuff that's out there that can be wrapped around like tpu or flexible filaments there's wood materials there's all kinds of other stuff out there when you need it it's there so you can check that out but pla is still a very reliable and a really easy to work with filament for most of the prints that we're doing these days number 11 is to set a taller first layer height for more consistent results in most slicing software and here i'm using cura which is totally free to use for anyone you can actually go in and add the settings or the ability to change the first layer height so that will be independent of all of your other layers so for example let's say you need to do something that's really detailed and you're setting it to a 0.1 layer height resolution you can tell it to set just the first layer to 0.3 trying to get a perfect first layer with a 0.1 millimeter resolution on it is really difficult your bed has to be incredibly level and everything has to be set just right if you set that to 0.3 your first layer has a lot more forgiveness and then the rest of it can still have that high quality 0.1 resolution that you're going for or 0.2 or anything in between i've discussed before several times but that first layer is crucial and setting it to 0.3 regardless of your other resolutions can be a real help number 10 is get a 3d printing pen so this little guy here for example is only thirty dollars i'll put links in the description to this and they go up from there you can definitely get really nice ones if you want to but they all function essentially the same i've got this connected to some pla here and i can feed this through but the reason i use this one the most is for fixing prints that have gone bad so for example this helmet looks really good until you see that the top is separate and the reason is something failed at some point on this particular print i got to this height it failed and so what i did is i figured out what height that was and i printed the top out from there so now i have the issue of connecting these two in a good and smooth way you can actually glue this back together and put the two pieces together but you're still going to usually end up with a bit of a gap so i use the 3d printing pen with the same filament and i go in and i squish that 3d printing pen material that pla or whatever the filament is into those gaps and then you can sand or cut that off or file it off afterward and it's almost like it was always one piece it gives it that nice finished look also 3d printing pens are just a lot of fun for just messing around you can buy these bags of filament like this one that has all different colors in it and usually they come with some samples my kids like playing with the stuff a lot too so they get to play with it and then if i need it it's around for something now these pens have different settings for different materials so you can set it to pla and it's usually going to go right up to around 200 degrees you can set it to abs and a lot of times some of the more advanced ones will let you just dial in whatever temperature you want and once it gets to the right temperature which this one is just about there we should see the screen turn green like that and then you can just hit the little go button down here and it's going to spit out the filament and you can kind of do whatever you want and then you hit stop okay it retracts just a little bit and then it can keep going so i've got that part done and i can do a second layer on this now and by going really slow i can kind of lay it on really thick and stop and there we go so obviously i'm not making anything that's going to win any awards here but you get the idea this can be really helpful for fixing prints as well as for doing little touch-ups or little one-off pieces that you want to be creative with with the 3d printing pen number nine on the list is octoprint now if you've seen my other videos you know i've mentioned this one before but a lot has changed and a lot more has become available with octoprint in the last few years you can develop plug-ins for octoprint and those just keep getting developed and we get cooler and cooler stuff that's coming out my favorite one still is octolapse and that's the ability to set up a webcam with your raspberry pi so octoprint basically installs on an image called octopi on a raspberry pi typically you can install it on other hardware as well and these things run anywhere from about 35 bucks and up and you can actually run these on an older version like this one it doesn't have to be the latest greatest but with octolapse for example you can have that webcam positioned to where the print heads will move out of the way and it will give you the exact same positioning for your bed and for your print heads every single time and it will take a snapshot at every layer typically and what that gives you is a nice buttery smooth time lapse that looks like the print is just materializing out of thin air and it's really cool looking if you want to see someone who does an awesome job with these time lapses check out wild rose builds this is a user that i've been following for a long time and he does some super cool 3d printing time lapses and he's got tons of them on his channel so i will put a link to that in the description below for you to check out and you can see that he does really cool things with lighting he's got really good camera equipment that he uses for it and he is even able to incorporate some motion into these time lapses which is really impressive stuff so check that out i'm pretty sure he's using either octolapse or a variant of octal apps to do a lot of this now in addition to that you can also do things like a heater timeout so for example if your heater is is done your print is done and it's been sitting there for a while it will turn the heater off if it's not been in use for a while which can be really helpful as far as safety is concerned you can monitor your your prints remotely you can even set up ai services to monitor them for you i did a whole video on the spaghetti detective which watches for those bits of spaghetti that come out when things go wrong and it will monitor that for you and even stop the print to prevent that from causing issues later on or wasting filament so you can check that video out on the spaghetti detective right up here but those are some of my favorites with octoprint now if you like the idea of octoprint you may want to check out clipper as well that's clipper with a k and that's actually pretty cool it can use hardware like the raspberry pi for example to act as a controller an additional controller for your 3d printer it gives you finer motor controls it gives you several options and upgrades that your printer may not have it's also free to use and it also can work in conjunction with octoprint so something cool to check out number eight is understanding your print bed adhesion methods and so there are three of those that you can choose from in addition to not using one at all so the first one is what's called a skirt and a skirt is the most common one for my uses and we'll talk more about that one in just a minute but a skirt is just laying down one or two or however many lines you select of filament outside of the print itself it's just kind of a little sample to say hey this is how it's going to print hopefully this looks good and it gives you a little foresight into how that prints gonna go now the second method is called a brim and a brim will add multiple lines around your printed object giving it more surface area to hold on to the bed an example of this is let's say you're printing a lightsaber handle where it's kind of tall but there's not a lot of it that's actually attached to the bed itself so if you add a brim to that you're increasing the surface area connected to the bed and that increases the chances that it will be stable while it's printing less likely to knock over and less likely to run into any issues or snags while printing the third option is called a raft and a raft is a whole set of filament that sits in between the object that's being printed and the bed and this can overcome a lot of difficulties that you're having with your printer especially if there's issues with the bed itself i've heard a lot of people comment that they use a raft because their bed is maybe not centered or not level or not even in certain places and so they can use a raft to always get a nice smooth print also if you're trying to go for a very specific tolerance for that first layer where that needs to be just perfect a raft can really help with that now keep in mind by nature by having that raft part of your print is going to be attached to it it will usually just break off really easily but just like with supports or anything else there may be some residue left over that you might have to sand off or clean up a little bit number seven is leveraging tree supports now there are a lot of people who don't care for these tree structures or tree-like supports but ever since cura introduced them a while back i've been playing with them and trying to experiment to get the best version of them and when they work they work great the problem is sometimes they don't work and they fail and a lot of that has to do with the speed that you're printing at as well as the tree structures themselves now if you're not familiar with the tree structure basically it's one of the support options available in most slicer softwares today where you have the option with your supports to do lines typically or zigzags or a grid or any number of different things for that support and a lot of the times those work really well but what the tree support does is it actually kind of gets out of the way and so it gives you minimal points of contact that you have to remove or clean up later and it tries to stay off of the existing print which is really nice you can see here for example that this tree structure will start off the print itself it's on the bed but not on the print model and it's going to just move up and position itself and it will actually curve underneath the support structure areas that it needs to support which is really nice and just like with any support you can choose whether to have this only come up from the bed or you can have it actually start on the print model itself if you'd like to do that and i found that doing that actually is still really pretty smooth and easy to clean up afterward so like i say i'm a big fan of the tree structure support and it makes my cleanup so much easier than traditional support methods number six is leveraging all of the new features available on new printers today a lot of these printers nowadays come with so many cool features that just weren't a thing three or four years ago so if you're looking for your first 3d printer i'd recommend oftentimes starting out with maybe a less expensive new 3d printer that's fairly recently released and well tested as opposed to going with something that's maybe a little higher end but older because a lot of times the features on these new ones are really impressive and they're going to help you be successful in your printing now there are a lot of these features that we can go over but a few that you might want to look out for are the ability to have filament run out detection so it will stop the print or pause the print as soon as it sees that there's no more filament in there there's also power failure recovery you can get auto bed leveling which is a really nice feature to have you can have really nice interfaces like color touch screen interfaces that make navigating around the printer really easy there are newer and better beds that oftentimes come with these newer printers and we'll talk more about that one in just a minute as well there's built-in wi-fi there are built-in cameras there's dual extrusion and all kinds of really cool features that you can get at a pretty affordable price just like we see with cars and computers you get more features for about the same price over time as the technology becomes less expensive and that's definitely the case with these 3d printers you can get a really impressive 3d printer for an affordable price and especially if you're looking for your first one you can start with something that maybe doesn't have all those features but has enough that you can feel confident in your initial 3d printing experience number five on my list and this one is super important and probably one of the biggest changes i've made to my 3d printing methods is to keep a clean bed it makes all the difference i found that by using isopropyl alcohol this stuff works wonders on the bed so this basically removes the finger grease that we leave on there when we touch the bed and by just touching it up and i like to use a microfiber cloth or you can use some of these shop towels here these shop rags and they ideally will leave little to no residue on there and you want to blow it off after to make sure but it evaporates quickly it just takes a second to do and that will give you the best chance of having a really successful first layer and getting that perfect stick that you need on that first layer now some beds don't work well with the alcohol if you're using what's called a carborundum bed which is what comes with the ender3v2 for example it advises on there that you don't use alcohol on that you can either use some dawn dish soap with some water in a spray bottle for example you can even just use glass cleaner and i've used this quite a bit and it works well but the gist of it is clean that bed often and that's really going to increase your chances of having a good first layer and it makes things so much easier when you're not worrying about it just kind of laying down the filament and then it pops right back up it's super annoying so clean that bed often use the alcohol when it's appropriate and it's going to make your life so much easier now on the topic of the first layer number four is leveling the bed using a skirt now the skirt is that bed adhesion method we talked about a minute ago where it's basically going to draw a line or two or however many you require around the object before it starts printing that is the perfect opportunity for you to make some micro adjustments to the four knobs on the outsides of the bed to get it to just the right first layer you don't want it squished in too much you don't want it up too high to where it's not adhering to the bed and that's a perfect time to do that so i still do recommend leveling just in the traditional manner and using the card here to get what you need as far as getting it at approximately the right height but i put a skirt on pretty much every print so i can just watch that first minute or two and then make any adjustments i need to feel confident that it's going to print the model perfectly on that first layer i call this on-the-fly skirt leveling and it's definitely something i would recommend because it has increased my success of that first layer manifold number three is printer beds and this is a somewhat controversial topic because again a lot of people have different preferences and opinions but the idea is you want your print to be able to stick successfully to the bed and not peel up not get elephant's foot or anything like that but also to be able to be easily removed after the print is done so i've had i think i'm on printer number 16 at this point and along with that i've had a lot of different print beds and tried all kinds of things and had lots of opinions on this over time currently my very favorite print bed is the carburundum print bed that creality has produced and i've got a whole video coming out on this shortly to talk about that and i'll put a link to that one right here as soon as that's ready but this stuff is really awesome particularly for pla as well as for petg because it allows you to when as it heats up it sticks really well to the bed but then when the bed cools down it releases it and it literally just pops right off there's no issues with it no using a scraper or a knife or anything like that it's just loose at that point so i love using this but that has its downsides the first one is that it comes in this size only as far as i've seen i have seen some larger ones that you can get for let's say if you have a 300 by 300 bed but a lot of times those are 50 or 60 dollars for that print bed with the carborundum coating on it so that's one option a really common one that i think is going to be most useful for most people is a magnetic flexible bed so i've got a couple of those over here here's one for one of my flash forge printers and it's got a total flex to it so you can kind of have the print on here and it will you can pop it off that way which is really nice but you can see there's not a ton of flexibility in here it can't move that much and it's not supposed to you don't want the thing to be able to bend in half or snap but one of the downsides of that is that if you've got a smaller item a lot of times you can't get quite up under there or you'd have to try to bend it with one hand and pry it with the other type of thing on the lot max shark v2 has a similar bed this is a little bit bigger volume but it's the exact same concept and then when you put the bed down it's got a magnet underneath and it just kind of sucks flat down there and does a pretty good job so i think that's a pretty good universal print bed for people to use of course you've always got glass and then you've got coated glass which is kind of what the carborundum is as well but you can just do straight up glass and you can coat that with hairspray or with glue sticks or with you know painters tape and different things like that i'm all about trying to get a print that works really well without having to use any sort of product on top of it and ideally minimal clean up but i'll have a little bit more about that in that video i was mentioning earlier another one that i've seen that i like is the creator 3 from flashforge here uses a little pin system so it's got all of these holes and you put it down and then you snap it into place and it locks in which is really nice and then again it's got some flex to it so you can flex your piece off there and just like before you've got only so much flexibility on that bed to be able to work with so and then the last one is your traditional stickers basically that you can use for with build tack they've got a little bit of a a grit or a surface tension on there to be able to hold these on and depending on the quality and the types that you get these can work really well by themselves but i found that i almost always end up getting some things stuck on there if your bed first layer is not quite right and that can cause some issues and it can start to destroy these but a lot of times they're really inexpensive to replace which can be nice so overall my favorite for doing pla as well as for petg especially if you've got that first layer at the right height is definitely the carborundum bed if you've got a printer that fits that and then next to that would be the magnetic beds which have some flex to them and you can just pop them off anytime so that's a quick overview on the different some of the different beds available i'm sure i missed some i'm sure there are some more but let me know in the comments which beds you prefer and what method you use and why number two is just a really simple way to monitor and control your 3d prints remotely a lot of times you are not able to be there all the time with especially a very long print and if you've got to step out or step away from the area where your 3d printer is here's a really simple solution you can use a smart plug and these can get pretty inexpensive i usually can get these on sale for about five dollars a piece this one particular set i got a four of them for 29 and so they're about 730 a piece not too bad and it just gives you the ability to turn your printer on or off so basically you plug your printer into this plug this into your power and then you can give this a name let's say you call it your ender 3 and then you can turn your android 3 on or off from anywhere in the world as long as you've got an internet connection so that's a really convenient way there but in order to monitor it you can use a wise cam as one option for example i've had a lot of wise cams over the years and these start at about twenty dollars nowadays it seems like you can't get them for less than about thirty dollars but even still here's the pan and with this one it allows me to move around if you've got this in an area with multiple 3d printers then you can move it around like this you can also move it all the way down i'm not sure if you can see the eye moving here but the eye is moving down and now all the way up so you can kind of position it around your 3d printers and move it wherever you like and keep an eye on your prints remotely if something's gone wrong then you turn the power off via the smart plug so a couple of things that you may or may not already have lying around the house or that you can get pretty inexpensively to monitor and remotely control your 3d prints and finally the one that i've ranked number one on this list is the ability to create your own models when you learn how to do some 3d modeling of your own in some 3d design it totally changes your outlook on 3d printing spending some time and if required even some money to be able to learn software like fusion 360 or sketchup or even tinkercad is a huge door that opens up as far as 3d printing is concerned it's a whole different ball game when you feel like you can print anything that you want because if it's not already out there you can design it if there's a version of it out there you can modify or adjust it to fit your particular needs it is a very cool thing to be able to do now personally i've been using sketchup for over a decade to try to learn how to do different 3d models and whether that's big stuff like redesigns of my basement or little things like how to do a little coin holder for my tripods for the little foot that goes under the camera so anything like that you can do in sketchup you can set it to work in millimeters or inches or anything that you need big stuff small stuff you name it it's totally free it's all online and it has its limitations in the free version but it's pretty robust and pretty capable for most people's needs tinkercad is another great option again totally online and totally free it's not going to compare to some of the more robust features that are available in paid software that cost quite a bit more but a great way to get started if you're ready to move on to something a little bit more robust fusion 360 is a great option out there there is a free for personal use option that you can use so they don't make that really readily available or obvious on their website but you can go down there and search for a free personal use license and as long as you're not selling your stuff then you can actually use that as much as you like up until you make a certain amount of money essentially so be sure to read the terms and conditions for that now there are tons of free resources out there for learning fusion 360. it's not a real simple one it is a steep learning curve and it's going to take some time i'm still learning it right now i'm trying to get to the point where i feel really comfortable designing kind of anything that i want to design but i'm really enjoying the learning process and it makes it a whole different thing when you feel like i can look at this 3d printer and i can if i can think it i can then design it and turn it into a model and then send it over to print and end up with something physically in my hands that i started from scratch it's super cool so i think that would be my number one tip that i wish i would have gotten started with a little bit sooner as far as 3d printing is start modeling start learning how to do stuff use mesh mixer for example another free one that will allow you to cut things into pieces if you want to take a larger object and cut it into smaller slices that fits on a smaller printer that's okay to do too and you can make some little adjustments and change how things are so definitely a very cool one to check out as well and as always all of the links to these softwares will be in the description below so now it's your turn i want to hear from you what you think are some of the best things that you wish you would have known before you started 3d printing or that you're glad you researched before you got into it what are some of the things that you've learned lately that have helped you save time or have success in your 3d printing journey now as i mentioned at the beginning of the video i do have a couple of other videos called 13 things i wish i would have known before i got started 3d printing these ones are a couple of years old but they actually have a lot of content that we did not cover in this video that i think will be helpful if you haven't seen those yet so be sure to check those out i'm nils with the 3d printing zone thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: The 3D Printing Zone

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Id: hl_rWNW_rmU

Length: 26min 5sec (1565 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021