3d Printing Tips for Beginners and Experts

hi this is irv shapiro with the make with tech channel now i'm a very fortunate guy for the last three years i've had the opportunity to create hundreds of videos teaching people how to make things by using desktop technologies and the majority of those videos are about 3d printing so over that time testing i don't know 15 16 different 3d printers printing many many reels of filament i've learned a couple things and i'm going to share with you today my top 10 tips thoughts ideas things you should think about if you want to succeed with 3d printing now this video is good for beginners who have never used a 3d printer and it's also good for older guys like me who've been doing it for a while but wanna see learn get ideas from from my experiences so if you want to learn more about 3d printing stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] now if you're watching this video you know i have a youtube channel but make with tech is a lot more than a youtube channel today i want to just tell you about two of the other components properties of make with tech the first is forum.makeotech.com can go to forum.microtech.com and you can leave notes leave comments post pictures ask questions of thousands of people that watch my videos the second place you should know about is models.makeotech.com if you want a better way to search thingiverse for models or more importantly you want to learn about some new highly creative models that are designed to be customized customized online right in the models that make with tech dot com website and then convert it into an stl file so you can print it then head over to models.microtech.com so let's start with number one yes that's a picture of a sewing machine now why is there a picture of a sewing machine on a 3d printing video well i'll tell you it's all about howard everyone has a howard in their life or at least everyone who has bought a 3d printer and begun playing around with it so howard's my next door neighbor he's a really smart guy and he's a lawyer so he's very very analytical he's also a really nice guy but when i go starting to talk about the things i'm doing with 3d printers his eyes start rolling he says to me you're not why would you buy a 3d printer you can go online you can buy all that stuff cheap inexpensive today why do you want us spend all the time and effort to 3d print things you can just buy well howard's missing the point and the point is the same point as a sewing machine now i buy my clothes but there are millions of people who enjoy designing and selling their own clothes so they go and they buy a sewing machine some people buy table saws and make their own furniture why do they do that well there are two reasons the first reason is and this applies to 3d printers it allows you to make bespoke items bespoke items are items that are custom that are unique that are exactly what you need so let's say you have a stroller for your kid or in my case for my grandchildren and one of the wheels on that stroller breaks and maybe it's not a new stroller it's a 10 year old stroller that my other children use for their kids we're having trouble finding one of these well i have a 3d printer so i can just print a new wheel and this wheel we're going to talk about because it's printed in nylon a little later the second reason is people make things because it feels good so when people ask me nowadays about 3d printing i tell them it's just like a sewing machine now item number two for those of you who've already used a 3d printer you recognize this as one of the wheels that you turn under the print surface of your 3d printer it's very important because a 3d printer prints by heating a filament and using a nozzle to draw patterns on a print surface then moving the nozzle up and drawing patterns again the distance between the nozzle and the print surface has to be uniform so if the print surface is on an angle it's going to be farther here and closer here that's not going to work so you need to level the print surface and you have some knobs underneath your printer print surface used to level it many of the newer printers though have a system called auto bed leveling and let me tell you a secret that's great i love it but it's not perfect so if you have a 3d printer this is hint number two and it has auto bed leveling but it also has knobs under the print bed before you use auto bed leveling the first time manually level that print surface and all the things i'm going to tell you about like leveling a print surface you can search for on my channel or there are many other creators on youtube who also speak about them so look up some videos about leveling the print surface even if you have an auto bed leveling system and level the print surface before your first print hint number three when i started with 3d printing there really was one choice for consumer grade 3d printers and those were fdm printers fdm printers use a plastic filament the plastic filament is heated in a nozzle extruded onto a print surface they work basically like a glue gun but over the last couple years you see a lot of resin based 3d printers in a resin-based 3d printer uses a completely different process so let's compare those two processes for a minute and then i'll tell you why i recommend everyone start with fdm printers unless they have a very special need in an fdm printer you have your reel of filament you can see that on the right of this picture you have an extruder with gears that pulls that filament off the reel and forces it through a tube called a bowden tube in many cases but not all into the hot end assembly there's a metal pipe in the hot end assembly that goes into the green area shown on this slide where there's a heater and a thermistor basically a thermometer and the filament goes into that heated section it's melted and extruded from the nozzle so the concept is very simple you pull the filament off a reel you send it over a tube you push it into an area where it melts and you draw lines then you move up and you draw more lines sort of like building a house out of bricks now fdm printers are wonderful they're readily available there are many many models at every price point from basically a hundred dollars i wouldn't buy a 100 printer but starting about 200 you get good quality consumer printers up until thousands of printers if you use pla a specific type of filament they're really pretty safe this is a non-toxic material it's made from organic materials like corn and yes people will argue that colored pla this actually colored because white it's not the natural color may have additives that are not as safe as the raw pla but in general it's consumed a very safe material let's look at the another type of printer this is called an msla printer a masked stereo lithography printer the concept is completely different the concept is you have a vat of resin that resin is nasty stuff you don't want to breathe it you don't want to get it on your hands because it'll harm your skin you have to be careful with it wear a mask you wear gloves now what you want to do is you want to use a light source to selectively harden that resin because when it's exposed to ultraviolet light it hardens how do you do that well you have a light source under the map you'll see that on the screen here on top of it you have an lcd screen like the screen in a phone and that lcd screen has the ability to make a dot a pixel black or white or it could do various shades but for this purpose let's say black or white if that screen on top of the light source has a black dot no light gets through if it has a white dot light gets through so if you light source you have a screen then on top of the screen you have a clear vat at least it's clear on the bottom that's filled with this resin you'll see in this picture that you lower a print plate down into the liquid so it's just layer height let's say 0.2 millimeters above the lcd screen on the lcd screen you turn the dots to white and black or clear and black as appropriate then you turn the light on depending on the resin you might turn the light on for a couple seconds or 10 or 15 or 20 seconds when you turn the light off a whole layer has been printed all at once this is much faster than an fdm printer now why wouldn't you always use these printers well for one thing the print area tends to be very relatively small at least in inexpensive units because you need a uniform light source you need that screen those are expensive components so to keep the cost area the print area tends to be relatively small number two the resin is nasty number three you still have to level that print bed and getting that print bed level depending on the printer can be quite tricky so i do not recommend msla printers to beginners or in general to hobbyists unless you have a specific need what would the need be well you want to print very small models with extremely good detail this is fantastic for it you want to print molds for jewelry with very fine detail this does it very well also and in fact msla and other resin-based printers are used extensively in the dental industry to make things like grounds so for my money though for the things that i do around the house for the replacement parts i make i use i stick to fdm printers and that's what we're going to talk about for the rest of this video number four all fdm printers are not created the same you're going to hear about two main categories fdm printers that are bowden tube and fdm printers that are direct extruder they're all the same parts they all have a roll of filament real filament they all have an extruder they all have a hot end they all have a nozzle what's the difference between the two where the extruder is the extruder are the gears that pull the filament off the reel and force it into the hot end if the gears are mounted on the side let's say of the printer and they push the filament through a tube to the hot end it's called a bowden tube style printer that's the picture you see here on the left if the gears are mounted as part of the hot end right on the printer then that is a direct extruder printer direct extruder printers i find are more precise because the filament moves shorter distances some people do believe however that bowdoin 2 printers can be in fact more accurate at high speeds because there's less weight moving around you don't have the motor on the extruder but the motor sizes on these extruders are getting smaller and smaller now once you get to that hot end assembly there are also two types and they have advantages and disadvantages the typical consumer hot end is a ptfe style hot end that's where a piece of the bowden tube that has a teflon coating is actually inserted into the hot end all the way down to the nozzle because the tube all the way down to the nozzle is this very smooth teflon like material they tend to be very reliable they're easy to use but teflon cannot be heated above about 230 240 degrees celsius without giving off fumes that are not good for you so most consumer grade printers are limited to about 230 degrees celsius and we look at filament in a minute we'll see that will limit your choices a bit on the right hand side in this picture you'll see an all metal hot end in that case there's a metal tube going inside the heated area those metal tubes can be made of a variety of different materials they can be a coated metal tube most people agree that hot ends that use a metal tube all the way down are a little more susceptible to jamming i haven't had a lot of problem with them and i use metal hot ends in a number of my printers but for a consumer probably a ptfe style printer with a limitation of about 230 degrees celsius is a good place to start suggestion hint number five learn about filament so there's a whole video on this channel there are many videos on youtube about different filaments but let me talk to you about the things you need to understand about filament the filament is made of a material they often have a short acronym in this case it's pla that generally stands for a very long chemical name that i can never remember they have a recommended print temperature and you'll see it printed in most cases right on the filament so this is hatchbox pla it says extrusion temperature of 180c to 210c i like to generally set my printer for the middle of that range so because pla generally is extruded at under 220 230 degrees c it's the go-to filament for most consumers but then they also have what's called a glass transition temperature what is that well when you take a plastic material or in general you take any material and you start heating it up it goes through various states it's solid then it goes to a state where it's like putty that's the glass transition temperature state starting to get pliable and soft then it goes to a state where it actually melts that's closer to the extruder temperature the glass transition state of pla is only 55 degrees to 65 degrees celsius that means about 130 140 degrees fahrenheit so let's say you print something out of pla maybe a bracket for your phone in your car it's a really hot day in phoenix arizona you leave the phone in your car which is probably not a good thing to do anyways but the bra it's on the bracket or you just leave the bracket in the car the car starts getting really hot that bracket's gonna start bending so you need to know the use of the particular material i'm probably not going to make coasters out of pla for hot coffee cups on the other hand pla is very very easy to print with it's really relatively strong but it's brittle pla has the characteristics very strong but then when it breaks it snaps it's not very flexible so these are characteristics you know about need to know about the different filaments in general going down the list a filament that was used a lot that you see in commercial products like legos is abs abs gives off fumes or a lot of difficulties in printing it i wouldn't recommend it for consumer and small business use unless you have a special use p-e-t-g prints at a little higher temperature i think it's a very good alternative to pla and the problem with petg is it tends to stick to the print bed the surface you're printing on too well so you're going to need to use an a special compound called a bed adhesive in order to make sure it releases or a simpler way is just put blue painters tape on your print bed if you're printing with petg print on that if it tears when it comes off who cares this stuff is cheap you can buy it at any hardware store so for things where you need a slightly higher glass transition point petg is great it's not necessarily depending on the petg stronger than pla but it is a bit more flexible whereas p l a will snap p e t g will bend more as you stress it and the glass transition temperature is about 80 c or 176 fahrenheit now what about tpu well a lot of the phone cases you buy commercially are made of tpu it's a flexible material it is very difficult to print on most bowdoin style printers why because it's like a wet noodle so trying to push it through that tube reliably is hard because it's like a wet noodle but a direct extruder where the extruder is right on top of the hot hotend it's just pulling it and pushing it a short distance those work great for tpu so i've printed a lot of things out of tpu and then there's nylon now i think nylon gets a bad reputation it gets a reputation of being very hard to print i don't think it's hard to print at all if you use the right nylon because there is actually nylon that will print at about 230 degrees celsius often nylon requires 260 but 230 is really very doable most printers and this was printed at 230 degrees celsius and it's a fantastic print what's the other challenge of nylon well the other challenge is you got gotta keep it really dry it's hydroscopic that means it absorbs moisture so you gotta store it in the right bag and unfortunately if you're going to print with nylon you probably need to buy a filament dryer now these are not all that expensive anymore well under a hundred dollars depending on what you're buying and they will dry out your filament before you use it to print number six slicers are not scary say that together with me slicers are not scary now what is a slicer well somebody designs a three-dimensional object they design it in a computer-aided design program they design it with a script out of open s-cad they customize it on models that make with tech.com and you have a three-dimensional object in a file it's in a format a 3d printer can't print a 3d printer is a really a two-dimensional device in many ways it prints a flat layer then it does move up and print another flat layer and move up and print another flat layer but it needs to know about how to draw that flat layer it's sort of like a plotter with a pen it needs to draw that flat layer so there's a program that takes that three-dimensional object and slices it into individual slices individual flat layers that's called a slicer the one that comes with many consumer printers is called cara and if your printer comes with kira i would stick with cara i've used a bunch of different slicers i like the prusa slicer for multi-color prints i like idea maker for multi-color prints with specialized two color printers called idex printers but i really stick with cura most of the time now what format is the slice file in it's in g-code so this is what g-code looks like this is not scary either it's just an instruction to the printer for where to go and how to draw a line g1 says go to x10 y10 x y z zero that means on the first layer and then extrude at 3 000 millimeters per minute minute 0.04 millimeters of filament simple that's what a slicer does now what people get scared about is they go into a slicer like kira they ordered some printer that nobody's ever heard of they go in to cura and they go to add their printer it's not listed what do they do oh my gosh it's not going to print nonsense they're really only a few general styles of fdm 3d printers they're 3d printers that look like a creality ender 3 or an anet 3d printer or they look like a prusa they have the same general shape and form they have a print bed that moves back and forth or potentially up and down they have an x-axis a y-axis they have a couple rods to move the print gantry up and down if you have a printer it looks like an ender three select ender three from cura as your printer yeah i know you don't have an ender three select ender three anyways and then when the printer name is displayed you can click on the printer name you can print on click on manage printer and machine settings and on the left hand side of this screen you'll see the only thing you really need to change in order to get started is if the size of your printer is different x y and height put in the correct size for your printer then click on the extruder tab and if you're buying a consumer printer 90 of the time it's going to use a 1.75 millimeter filament and you're ready to print now what about profiles that's setting up the printer what about profiles any of the standard cura profiles are pretty good today so if even if you're not using an ender three if you selected n3 select the normal ender3 profile and try a print and if you've leveled your print bed that's the first thing you always do when you get a 3d printer in all likelihood it's gonna work fine number seven i personally don't like fully enclosed 3d printers this happens to be an ultimate 2 from monoprice it's a great printer i used it for about two two and a half years i just donated it to a school it'll last another two two and a half years why don't i like fully enclose printers well theoretically they give you the ability to use more filament types that require better controlled temperatures nylon likes better controlled temperatures abs where it likes better controlled temperatures if you're using it in a school or library they keep little fingers out of it here's the problem pla which is what most people print with doesn't like tightly controlled temperature it likes a lot of airflow in order to print reliably and therefore if you're using a fully enclosed printer with pla you're probably gonna end up leaving the doors open anyways unless it has a built-in fan and most of the low-end ones don't the second thing is the last hint we're going to talk about is about printer maintenance it's really hard to fix and maintain things on fully enclosed printers you can't get to all the stuff it's just really hard to get to the stuff so i don't like fully enclosed printer what i do like to do is to buy an aftermarket enclosure if i want to enclose my printer you can buy them from anywhere from fifty dollars to five hundred dollars they're available on lots of aftermarket sources on the internet so that's a case around the outside that you basically put over your printer and you can take it off anytime if you want to work on it for maintenance number eight bed adhesives are not cheating yeah i know people have told you you can use hairspray well that's messy and ugly you can use elmer's glue you can use this use that well nowadays they make things that make it easier to ensure your print sticks to the print bed use them they're not expensive per print a few pennies per print now a tube of this is fifteen dollars maybe it's twenty dollars now but in the scheme of things if you save a whole bunch of prints that because your prints come loose because they're not sticking to the print bed because that first line you draw on the print bed has to stick and when the print bed cools off you want it to come off print adhesives make a big difference if you're using petg you must use a print adhesive of some type so it will release or some type of material depending on your print bed or it will damage your print bed item number nine there are a variety of components in every 3d printer there's the heating element in the hot end there's the thermistor effectively the thermometer on the hot end there are a series of different stepper motors those are motors that precisely turn just the right amount that are used on various components specifically there are two areas of every 3d printer that are relatively easy to calibrate where calibration is where you match the software to the characteristics to the performance of the components in your 3d printer you can't change the components in the printer but you can match the software to those components the first calibration you want to do on every 3d printer is called pid calibration when you want to set the temperature of the hot end to a particular temperature you basically turn the heating element on until it gets to the right temperature then you stop but it's not that easy try to heat up a pot on the stove and keep it at exactly the right temperature what you actually do is you heat it up till it goes slightly above the temperature you want then you turn off the heating element it cools off a little bit then you turn on the heating element and you're turning it on and off the rate at which it heats up and it cools down is all captured in the pid parameters and there's a procedure you use for sending pid that procedure consists of connecting a usb cable to your 3d printer and to a computer and then running a g-code terminal application that allows you to send commands to the printer to calibrate the pid parameters likewise every stepper motor those motors that turn your extruder specifically in this case are a little different but you want to make sure when you tell the extruder to extrude 100 millimeters of filament it extrudes 100 millimeters of filament it pulls 100 millimeters off so how do you do that well once again you can't change the stepper motor but you can measure what it actually does and then put those parameters into the software in your 3d printer that is the e-step stepper motor calibration now there are a variety of software programs you can use to connect your computer over a usb cable to your 3d printer but many of them are old they don't all work quite the way you'd like they may not be supported on the latest version of mac os or windows so i created a custom utility just for this purpose it's called 3d hyphen printing hyphen tools dot make with tech dot com if you go to that url that web page will walk you through calibrating your printer and it supports connecting your printer over a usb cable number ten printers are mechanical devices there are lots of moving parts they get loose so on a regular basis that might mean weekly if you do a lot of printing it might mean monthly if you print periodically you need to go through your printer and tighten up all the bolts so that they're snug you don't want to over tighten things so they're snug you need to tension all the belts so they're snug and one of the most common calibrations on a lot of printers today is you need to calibrate how the printhead rides across the x-axis so the printhead is sitting on the x-axis there are different ways that it sits on the x-axis depending on the brand of printer you have on a lot of printers they use wheels to hold that on the access and if those wheels are too tight it's going to rub same thing for the print bed on the bottom it's going to rub and not be moved smoothly if they're too loose you're going to get wiggles it's not going to be great and your print quality will suffer how do you tighten those they use something called an eccentric nut so you'll see on the left hand picture that above one of the wheels is something that looks like a large nut the other wheel is just a round post if we look on the right side we'll see what that nut actually looks like the center of the nut is off centered so when you turn it it moves that post in and out so you can tighten that up and loosen that up if you see these eccentric nuts on your 3d printer about monthly you need to make sure they're properly tightened so if you check your belts your bolts you re-level the print surface manually about once a month to make sure it's right you make sure cables are plugged in all the way and i yeah i like to use silicon grease and you can buy it from a bunch of different manufacturers to lubricate the rods that the z axis uses those are the rods that the x-axis moves up and down on well folks i hope you learned something today out of these 10 hints and some other comments i've made along the way um there's probably something in this video for everyone if you did give me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel recommend these videos to everyone you know go to models.makotech.com to find models go to forum.makotek.com to discuss this video and most importantly let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 35,721

Keywords: 3d printer, 3d printers, 3d printing, 3d printing videos, what is 3d printing technology, bed leveling 3d printer, bed leveling sensor, auto bed leveling sensor, nozzle height 3d printer, 3d printing for beginners, bltouch auto bed leveling sensor, z offset calibration, 3d printing tips and tricks, how to 3d print, 3d printing 101, bed adhesion, 3d printing ideas, 3d printing tips, 3d printing for beginners guide, beginner 3d printing, 3d printer calibration

Id: YD0v3AO3Wog

Length: 35min 25sec (2125 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2022