Getting started with 3D printing

so more and more 3d printed stuff is making its way onto my reloading bench everything from simple little things to help me stay organized all the way up to major component redesigns that make stuff work better it's all brilliant and i want to be a part of it so recently i reached out to my audience and asked them what 3d printer they recommended there were a ton of different recommendations which i see is a good thing i guess it means there's a lot of people out there with a whole lot of different products finding success as you can see i ended up going with the ender 3 s1 this printer hasn't been on the market very long so it includes some of the upgrades and features that people are doing to the earlier ender 3 printers if i wanted to invest a little bit more time into this i think going with the ender 3 pro or the ender 3 v2 might have been the better choice because i get those and then i just immediately order a couple of upgrades and i'm able to order the exact upgrade i want so i may have ended up in a better more capable printer for pretty much the same money if i had gone that route but it would have been it would have been a little bit of hassle right there would have the learning curve would have been a little bit steeper if i'm taking it out of the box and immediately upgrading and installing things that i don't really understand yet on the other side of things a lot of folks made a really convincing argument for the prusa the mk3 s plus and it was just more money that i wanted to spend and the lead times were going to be like five to eight weeks so i decided to stick with the s1 i'm not currently planning to to make anything to sell that's not really what this is about if it was about that like if i had some design like i'm gonna make something awesome and i'm gonna sell it i probably would have gone with the prusa and you know convinced myself that i could make up that additional cost with all of the amazing stuff i'm going to sell so beyond those three choices i bring up like i said there were a lot of other recommendations so it seems like a good time to be getting into 3d printing i'm hoping this is going to be pretty straightforward so the plan for this video it's in a sealed box i want to take it out set it up do our first test prints get comfortable with it feel like we're printing halfway decent and then i want to design something i mean even if it's a box just something straightforward because i don't have any experience with any of that either i played around for like 20 or 30 minutes on tinkercad and there are several other entry-level 3d design options we might look into i don't know we'll go through all the slicing software and whatnot that we need to deal with to print that design and that's that's probably about it that's probably what we'll cover i have picked up three different types of filament this brand is inland which i think this is the house brand for micro center where i bought the printer now i don't really know enough at this point to tell you much of anything about the differences between pla pla plus and petg but we're going to try all three and maybe we'll just figure it out together okay no surprises here something i saw mentioned in the videos i watched was that this installation manual has extremely small font that's pretty difficult to read so that's useless for me so i printed out a full size copy it's only like 10 or 11 pages and that just makes things much more easy to deal with a copy of the manual did come on the sd card yeah they sent a little eight gig sd card with manuals videos and some initial test files to play around with along with probably outdated copies of their software so actually we're going to go ahead and put it in the slot here for safe keeping it's as good a place as any to keep it they send a card reader so that's nice of them so four bags of screws for assembly isn't too bad and what's nice is the little baggies are well labeled so that makes things pretty simple all right i think we got all the tools to put it together there were some various spare parts it's like a spare nozzle i think there's a z-axis limit switch and a cable of some sort people had warned me that this wasn't really well documented but i'm kind of shocked because this is it this isn't it says quick installation guide there's no full manual that i saw on the card maybe there's something on the website we'll check later but you're not going to get many details and you know i just get the feeling that figuring crap out for yourself is one of the charming things about 3d printing can't be holding people's hands and letting the hobby get popular you know all right product installation step one place the nozzle assembly on the mounting back panel of the extruder okay so it looks like one two three four those are our screw holes here but i wanted to show you guys this is the this is the only place so far i've seen something be a little bit janky looks like this maybe got bent and that connector is definitely not sitting flat on the board so i'm going to go ahead and kind of straighten it out a little bit i guess it's okay these are pretty thick wires because i believe this is the the actual heater right there's our there's our little nozzle where our plastic is going to come out so a fair amount of current in those little guys and they're very rigid wires and i think that might be what's kind of tweaking that a little bit i think we're okay yeah it sits right down on there with this next step i don't even understand what they're saying i guess this little clip slides on there okay next gantry frame installation all right let's kind of test test fit this thing just a little bit yeah that's about where it needs to be i guess i need to lay it on its side or maybe slipping it to the edge of the table here would be easier if i can find the screw holes there they are yeah i think this edge of the table method here is going to work out pretty good i'm not going to tighten those very much yet let's flip it around and get the other two tell you what that base is a lot heavier than it looks so i'm not fully understanding some of the instructions like i said rotate the bottom assembly by 180 degrees to ensure that the profiles on both sides are leveled up and down i don't i don't really know what they mean by that but yeah both sides went down into a little slot kind of yeah you can kind of see that silver spot on the base i guess it would be possible not to get it down in that slot maybe that's what they're talking about yeah i don't know i think i got it good i'm going to tighten it down so our little holder for the display is these three holes nice set of t-handle allen wrenches would make this process a little bit easier okay there's our display holder and it's got two big old ding-dongs hanging out the back let's slip in that sounded weird okay it's fine just has a nice crispy sound so i guess next here is our material rack that's our filament run out sensor and i guess this handle just goes in like that okay and i guess this just snaps onto the top of the bar like that and then we start plugging stuff in here i guess is the wire for this and i guess the routing of this main ribbon cable yeah there's very little info about cable routing this one picture here has some cabling in it but every other diagram of the machine shows it with no wiring like here this is in the future we're loading our filament into a printer with no ribbon cables that's helpful all right so there's this big one like flat 24 pin or something like that clearly goes into this dude yeah the connector goes right there and clearly this is supposed to go down in here i guess at least the connector is keyed so i know i'm not putting it on backwards i really want to drop this thing like lower the z-axis but i don't know if that's going to screw something up whatever i need more room to work what i'm worried about now is that when i turn it on if it thinks this is higher and it goes to home like all the way down i don't want it to crash into the printing bed so i think once i'm done with this cable i'm gonna try and raise this back up all the way okay i think i got it under those tabs yeah i'm happy with that okay so this is the connector we just put on i turned the machine pointing away from me and if we follow it down there's these two pigtails coming out of the ribbon cable even has a little x label on it so that should plug in right here now i got this all wrong these are the z-axis motors right obviously the x-axis motor is this is this guy over here so this plugs in right there and that little clip we installed earlier is strain relief for that okay that makes more sense where does this other little guy go that's where the second connector goes one on the back one on the front let me go ahead and raise this thing back up okay there it is all the way up i was just wanting to make sure that wasn't going to pinch so hopefully that's routed correctly and okay then straight below that looks like the cable we need to plug in here is taped back here there it is similar thing over here on the other side got a little cover here there's our other z connector and a little three wire job that goes up to our filament detector and this one in the middle is labeled expansion interface so i guess we're not using it alright and in the back of our display gets this guy all right i think that's it i've got this one leftover bag of screws i need to check the instructions and figure out where i was supposed to use those okay so these screws are not talked about at all in the manual but they're identical to the screws in this spare z-axis limit switch i shouldn't say spare one of these is just not installed on the z-axis and i was looking there's one back here for the y-axis looks very similar and up here for the x-axis but what i think's going on is the auto leveling setup maybe serve some of the same functions because you know the next step we're about to power it up and go through the auto leveling and the instructions say please use the cr touch auto leveling first which is this little guy right here says if cr touch is damaged please install z-axis limit and manually level the bed for details please refer to the instructions stored on the sd card there's nothing on the sd card so i'm just going to move forward being optimistic that everything's fine but i might look into it and see if there would still be advantages to installing this because this doesn't go here as far as i can tell it mounts over here let me go ahead and bring this thing down manually which actually this is not a bad idea anyway just to make sure our ribbon cable is going to do what we expect and not going to hit anything and i want to be really careful as our nozzle gets close that's close enough but yeah i guess this would be installed here and this carriage would be coming down to hit our switch and then i think this cable connects connects this to the main board down below i guess yeah it looks like i did brought this cable in correctly that's for a round cable there's a slot here i didn't notice where it looks like this will slide down in yeah i think that's better okay one more important thing before we fire this guy up we need to make our selection between 230 and 115 volts and that is really back in their ways isn't it right now it's on 230. it's just a little slider like usual and looking good okay i think we're ready for first power-up i've moved the z-axis all the way to the top i guess we can go ahead and pull this off the screen which that screen protector has a warning about the voltage switch on it all right here we go okay looking good so far instructions say to go to level interesting down there at the bottom where it shows our x y and z position it's flashing question marks it's all right as soon as we hit this it should it automatically returns home for automatic calibration of 16 points and then returns to home again to complete the leveling here we go okay that was a little bit loud so it went all the way to those x and y limit switches and click those and then our z is coming down slowly i'm ready to jump for that power switch if it comes down and just starts jamming into the bed okay good and then i think it said it would go home all right so i guess that's that i need a sheet of paper okay the next step is to go to prepare and go to z offset it says to adjust the z-axis compensation value so that the height from the nozzle to the printing platform is about the thickness of a piece of a4 paper click the knob to confirm complete the setting of z-axis compensation value okay so right now the value says negative 2.83 and i don't know which direction is up yeah there it went okay so i made it less negative it was negative 2.8 i think now i'm at negative 2.75 and the paper started sliding under negative 2.78 it's getting draggy 2.79 2.8 2.81 2.82 i remember a video i watched they were talking about that like you know if the paper bends like that that's a little bit too much yeah negative 2.81 i'm getting i'm bending sometimes but negative 2.80 seems okay all right so i'm gonna click there to confirm that and i think we're good the next part in the manual is auxiliary leveling it says that if the inclination of the printing platform is larger than two millimeters the automatic leveling fail please use auxiliary leveling and that's where you start cranking on these four wheels under here but we're not going to worry about it ours didn't fail i guess now we need some filament so it's kind of late but for a quick test tonight i think i'm just going to open up this little bit of filament they send and we'll just try and print one of the pre-sliced files that's already on the card i definitely expect it to fail spectacularly so i guess that just hangs on there and then this goes through the through the sensor and we come down into here i think we push that down okay that went in pretty far i feel like there's some preheating we should have done yeah let's try this preheat pla which it looks like the bed temperature says 60 and i guess that's the nozzle temperature is set to 200. they do provide this material guide with the temperatures and crap which i guess is for their the stuff they send and it 6200 looks like the correct the correct settings yeah it looks like we're getting a little snake of melted plastic coming out of the bottom now all right here goes nothing let's just go oh i need the sd card okay now there should be something in here shake hands rabbit handle let's do cat i have a cat i like cats oh something's happening so okay we're laying down plastic definitely got some spaghetti going there like holy crap it's kind of working that first white outline is maybe squished down a little bit more than it should be i'm kind of in shock here like i didn't even wipe off the surface you know getting adhesion on the work surface is a big deal and i think i was supposed to clean this off with alcohol or something i didn't do anything i honestly didn't expect to get this far if it's going to go ahead and run i guess we could look through the menu because there's tune pause and stop so let's go and see what's in this tune okay so we can adjust our printing speed and our nozzle temperature bed temperature everything yeah looks like pretty mostly pretty straightforward stuff it's like it's calculated at a remaining time four and a half hours it's like midnight right now this was bad choice because like letting it run unattended seems dumb but i don't really want to stay up half the night but it it seems wrong to cancel its very first print job you know okay so we are 27 done one hour and 11 minutes into it this is the only problem i've seen so far i'm not really sure how you're supposed to handle this but i'm not really worried about it because we're gonna have spools so not sure why they don't put this on a little spool tell you what some of the details coming out on the front of this print are blowing my mind like that looks really good and that severe overhang we've got between the cat's feet there that seems to look pretty good once we get into slicing i think that's going to be you know a big topic because you know you can't lay down plastic in midair so those overhangs like that can be tricky i guess so we'll get to that later i guess so three hours remaining i think i'm in for the long haul we are down to the last two minutes i am shocked by this we didn't even check the belts on this thing to make sure they were tensioned properly we didn't update the firmware they are pretty mesmerizing to watch it's pretty awesome how all those small details are even possible looks like the last few lines there it goes man that is awesome so it's asking me to confirm here okay that puts us out to the main screen so it looks like our nozzle temp is dropping and so is the bed temp i assume i should probably get this out of here while the nozzle's still hot that's what i'm gonna do i don't know if it's right or not i think i can do that maybe the kit does come with this little acupuncture needle sort of thing trying to poke it down through maybe yeah whatever that's good enough so it's definitely not perfect but i'm totally impressed for an unconfigured printer that is really cool all right so i got a little bit of sleep so let's get our print off of the work surface the first thing i wanted to kind of just check and see is make sure it wasn't loose or anything it feels like it's well adhered so this whole black part here which i believe is spring steel just pops right off so i think i'm supposed to give this a little bit of a bend and there went something i'm not sure it might be better to take these off while everything's warm all right so i just cracked it right there i was thinking about this last night these two pillars below the hands i'm not sure if those are supports that are meant to be popped off i think they are because as it was printing i was noticing the quality on those you know you can definitely see the the lines and stuff a lot clearer than you can on the actual body all right let me keep on bending here there i think that was it was a good pop but didn't quite get us free man that did not want to come off of there then our two supports yeah that one didn't quite i guess that's why the kit comes with this looks pretty sharp what about this single line i guess i'm going to have to go do some research okay managed to get the putty knife under that guy okay after a little bit of scraping that's what i'm left with we definitely got good adhesion right we'll have to look around find out what the normal procedure is for cleaning these so i do notice a couple uh stringy little wisps but definitely not bad that should like brush right off let's have a look at that overhang that was impressing me as it was starting yeah right there that is really really cool got some more little wispy hairs in here i am really happy with these fine little details very cool stuff now the the clearance between these posts the support posts which actually probably look at that right where those popped off i can't even tell where it was attached on that side that side that side's got a little bit of a rough spot on it but not bad at all what i was going to say is whenever they were attached the clearance there was really really tight but i don't really see any marking maybe there maybe that's what that's from nothing on the other side all right extremely successful first print could not be happier so i'm not going to be able to work on this for a couple of days probably so what i want to do is uh go ahead and use up the rest of this filament that came with the printer by just printing out a bunch more stuff that's already on the card tell you what though before i start another print i better better research a little bit on cleaning that guy up okay so i learned a couple things there are a bunch of people with build plate cleaning videos and most of them are kind of useless they're dissolving glue with alcohol or just wiping off dust basically and then the comments section of all those videos is a bunch of people with our problem here where i got pla stuck on there and those conversations were much more useful so i really should not have gone at this thing with the scraper like i did you can see i've lost some texture in that middle part i mean i think i'm okay here but that was a very stupid thing to do apparently the right way is really to heat up the bed and then clean it off but a lot of people said as long as you get it to where it's not anything significant which you know this this is nothing it'll probably release and come off with the next print now the reason for this was that i had my my x-axis offset too high let me let me get this thing back on here it's pretty powerful magnet so yeah if you remember back to where i was setting the the height with the piece of paper i should have gone a little bit higher this first layer just didn't have enough room between the nozzle and the bed height to lay down that nice bead or it's kind of a squished bead a little bit mine was flattened out and smushed into the into the build plate so another thing i want to do before i continue my test prints is is go ahead and check the firmware and update it if it's needed which i'm pretty sure it will need it so let me turn it on and we'll get the current version which is probably under control so let's go down info okay current version 1.0.3c okay so there's a 1.0.5 available on the website so i downloaded it unzipped it and put it in a folder on here i'm wondering whether it's going to need to be in the root directory we'll see i'm sure there's a million places to tell us how to do this but i'm going to plug in the card and we'll just see what happens and nothing happens well that's kind of good because whenever i saw this store configuration option it made it made me want to try it all it does is beep well let's reboot this thing and see if it finds our files on the card nope no such luck okay so i grabbed a different card and dumped the files right in the root directory let's wake up our screen there it is all right let's reboot it okay that didn't work either let me go look up what to do so apparently we were doing it right but it did not like my other sd card so i went ahead and deleted all the crap off this card or transferred it off to a folder on my desktop and unzipped the firmware stuff onto here only so hopefully this time we reboot something different is going to happen well it does seem to be taking an extra second info there we are let me go put our print files back on the card and we'll run through that leveling process again see if it works as well as it did the first time [Music] okay that completed successfully so let's do our z offset adjustment i think that's about where i had it before on mine it's negative 2.78 i'm almost tempted to to go a little bit too high on purpose which we'll do that eventually i want to go with it about right there a little bit of drag on the paper but a lot less than i had before so what i want to do now is load my pla well i guess i should maybe set the temperatures first control temperature nozzle temp was 200 oh that's okay i'm an idiot yeah i'm a total idiot so under control i'm going to set all of this stuff back to zero yeah all of that should have just been left to zero because under prepare whenever you go to reheat pla like i should have that's when these are going to get filled out okay it all makes sense now so we're almost up to temp let me get ready to load the filament and i'll tell you what i'd like to i'd like to have the nozzle up off the bed a little bit whenever i'm loading the filament so i think i can go to move move z and hopefully i want to make sure i'm not going to ram it into the bed here yeah positive positive numbers are moving it up so i want to put it at there we go about 55 leaves me some room to work yeah it lifts a little left a little drop of plastic there where the tip of the nozzle was okay so much for heat up the bed it'll come right off whatever okay the filament's loaded but what i forgot to do last time is you're supposed to cut this at an angle yep supposed to snip it off into a point so it feeds through a little bit easier so i'm going to pull this back and i guess just push this down in and still until plastic starts oozing and we've definitely got some oozing perfect so let's start a new print i'm going to go back let's auto home and let's just print the exact same thing we'll print the cat again just to make sure that this firmware version does just as good a job i can already tell that looks taller than it did not squishing it down quite as bad as we were which is good yep i think that's better okay so i'm gonna let this run if it goes just like it did last time i'm gonna move on to the next generic file that's on the card and i'm just going to print over the next couple days until i've got time to work on this a little bit more so if everything goes well i should see you here in just a second with a whole bunch of stuff to look at [Music] [Music] so i've kept the printer running almost non-stop over the last few days and i've finished 13 prints so the original little bit of filament that came with the printer it lasted for three so i made two cats and one of these weird handles and then i had to switch over to my box of standard pla so the one minor change i made was to bump up the temperature you can see this stuff says 215 to 230 and with the original stuff we were using the default temperature in the profile which was 200. so initially i'd switched to 220 degrees and eventually i started playing around a little bit and we'll look at those really close i want to compare like yeah there we go with these i've got ones that i printed at different temperatures we'll go we'll go find some better lighting and look at them closely so here's my last one still on the bed and this one's been sitting here almost 12 hours since it finished so this is a problem that stuck with me is getting these things off of here well getting the work piece isn't hard a little bit of flex and it'll come right off but getting these thinner layers off has continued to be a struggle yep should be able to just crack it right off like that and then with these especially the straight one i can usually find a spot where it'll lift off like that and more often than not this gets the whole thing not always but usually yep almost all right straight line is usually the easy part this one is where things get tough i usually just have to go around and kind of test it at different spots there like that and then this will probably come right off almost the worst one i had was the highest print temperature i tried this 230 degrees was a nightmare had to do some scraping and i ended up gouging the surface somewhere i can't there it is i dug my putty knife right in there and damaged the surface i don't know if these build plates or whatever they call them are supposed to have a finite life span but this seems like something well i'm gonna at least need to replace it once probably okay i want to kick off one more print and show you how i've been adjusting temperature so i'll just pick my print file which is this little chip let's print one of these click ok and it'll start so the first thing that happens is it begins to warm up the bed and right now you'll see the nozzle temperature is zero so it's got a bed target of 60 and a nozzle target of zero what i found is if i set my nozzle temperature now to like 220 remember the range on our new box of pla was 215 to 230 so i want to set it to 220. if i do it now it'll overwrite my change or at least it did i got the timing wrong one time and my change didn't take so i always wait for the bed to get up to temperature first before messing with the nozzle all right so it's getting up to to its target and we should now see the nozzle temperature there it goes 200 so once it's set itself to 200 i go into tune the second item down is nozzle temperature let's change that to 220. click ok and go back out to the main and now you'll see we're at 220. so the printer is not going to do anything until it hits both of these targets and i guess that's that's one thing i didn't understand early on is i thought that entire prepare menu and preheating stuff and everything was something you know we needed to do manually and it doesn't seem to be the case so we just hit our nozzle temperature which means our printer should wake up here in just a second i haven't gone through any bed leveling procedure or anything since we did it right there at the very beginning so it lays down those three strips on the left and then moves over to the center and does the little outline and then starts printing okay let's have a close look at some of these prints a little bit of the wispy stuff put a white one right right next to it so some of the flaws like at the top of the mouth on the bottom of the nose seem to be on all of the prints so that tells me it's not necessarily any issue with the printer it's the way it was sliced or other settings like that is what i'm thinking right now have a look at this overhang here that part's pretty surprising and i think i'm going to have a lot to learn as far as what the capabilities of the printer are as far as horizontal portions and what needs support and what doesn't right these this support here that's trying desperately to come off we'll go ahead and pull it off the reason that's needed is because there's no other way to print something that's that close to horizontal there's a look at that tight little space between the support and the actual print let's go ahead and pop that one off as well a lot of these small details just blow me away so all of the cats came out equally good the two white ones were printed at 200 degree nozzle temperature and then this was a 220. so let's move on to some rabbits there's some more stringy stuff and that weird line right below the eyes shows up on all three i guess that's another one where you know if we wanted to clean that up or get rid of that it would be a job for the slicing software not our printer at least i think so i wasn't able to find any significant difference between these you see like the numbers this was the sixth piece that i printed i was keeping track of which one was which but it got to a point where they were all coming out exactly the same they were all coming out really really good in my opinion so i stopped worrying about it here's the coin that we're printing downstairs right now i think this one blows my mind more than any of the others because this side right here is the one that touches the surface of the build plate so it was built up from there so i'll be interested once we pop this file open in the in the slicing software just like how is this not printing over top of thin air you know this part right here or if you imagine one of the lines that's above the bee like those lines of plastic had to span all the way from there all the way over to there so this this little print is pretty darn cool because it's showing off stuff that i didn't even realize was possible now huge texture difference right you can i wonder if we actually could separate any of the individual plastic strands it doesn't look like it now it all seems to be melted together but pretty rough texture when we compare it to the other side so then comes the handles not sure what this handles for but it looks to me like this part right here is just support and we're meant to snap that off i believe but before we do that let's actually the the khaki color one might be a little bit easier to see what's going on it's pretty neat stuff and the texture on the handle is pretty neat as well so let's see if we can crack that part off see if we can just slide a screwdriver in there nope there we go maybe this corner okay there's half of it maybe this is what that putty knife's for that they gave us so i guess that's pretty cool here's the back side it's got some squiggly garbage on both sides as well let's see if the other the other example we've got has that yep it sure does exact same thing tell you what let's see if this brand of pla cracks off a little bit easier it did so that cracked off and scraped off a whole lot easier it's got me thinking maybe that's going to be an important thing when you're using large support structures like that getting the temperature just right so it releases properly i can see that being important so yeah these are pretty boring pretty straightforward and i think the printer did what it was told now comes in these handles we'll look at this one first i think this might be a handle for the top of the printer maybe some of that extra hardware they provided would allow you to attach this up where the filament spool is and have a little handle for your printer maybe i don't know so the first couple flaws that jump out at me i'm pretty sure this is the first one i ever did it was this stuff which i i think the most common cause of this is just the nozzle being a little bit too hot and oozing more than it should and this also has breakout support structures here on the side i'll tell you what let's see if we can get this first one out of here i have a feeling these are going to be a pain there it went that's a pretty cool looking structure and it actually seems to have broken free pretty cleanly pretty cool stuff all right here on this side a little bit of hairy stuff or it's not like it's not going anywhere it's there it's just a little bit a little bit ugly this this would have been the top of the print so like the last the last passes before it finishes are right there if we flip it around to the other side we see a flaw in the e and that same flaw is on every single one that i printed so i'm not sure if we're supposed to pop this out if this is actually a little support yeah i think that's what it is how about that figured that was the case so after i printed the first one and i you know i was already using this the new filament and i saw these and i saw these and then over here underneath there's a couple more that's when i decided to start messing around with the temperature a little bit so at this point i'm i'm printing it 220 degrees this one was printed at 200 degrees so this is 15 degrees less than what our filament calls for as a minimum this is what it was kind of an accident like i was talking about earlier with the changing the temperature on the fly my settings got overridden but when this thing finished i'm like well okay so we're definitely not too hot but i still have those exact same two nibbens up here and then a couple of more down there so here's the here's the last one we were looking at you can see they're still there a lot of them seem to you know line up in the exact same spot but then again there's some that don't the ones on the top definitely seem to so i thought okay what if we go the other direction and go as hot as we possibly can so 230 was the max listed on that filament documentation so here's 200 versus 230. it's all right two 230s on the bottom now not a whole lot of difference it's a pretty big temp swing i i expected something definitely got more of it over here this is 230 tapas 200 bottom is 230. quite a bit of difference on this side a little bit of change on the other side but you know they're both good prints i think let's see if we can pop them out all right let's do the 230 degree first it came out it wasn't quite as eager to come out as that last one a little bit of leftovers in there all right now the 200 degree one that maybe came out a little bit easier and i think the texture difference we see here yeah it's because they were it's because they're reversed i need to pop out this side we go so 200 on the left 230 on the right swing it around listen i'm sure 3d printer nerds probably agonize over some of the little differences we're seeing here but this is this seems like nothing to me it really goes for all of the prints i've done so far like they all seem really good so folks we got nothing but success so far i printed a bunch of these because this was the longest job on the card i think this took four four and a half hours or something like that so between all of this stuff i mean i'm i've probably got 30 hours or so on the printer i'm not sure if that's a thing to count but print hours like 30 maybe even 40 and i don't have a single failure or major flaw to show you that's pretty exciting to me all right now let's find something else to print oh god anything else i'm so sick of printing these same couple things all right i got my comically huge cursor and i think we're ready on the creality website under support we can go to download and back to our firmware up upgrade right here is ender series firmware s1 and then here are our files so you end up with a zip file and then when you extract that you're left with this folder right here so these two folders and these two files are what i copied onto the sd card not the whole folder these individual things so if you open up the sd card this is what you would see and that's what worked for them we just plugged it in turned it on and we were done now back to the website under software i want to grab the creality slicer it's like this is the windows version and this down here is the mac version so what i'm downloading now is for 4.8.2 so let's compare that to what came on the card so everything that was originally on the sd card i just copied directly off into this folder so this is this is what we get all of the g-code files and the stl files for the for the prints i've been making but up here under software and drive reality slicer 4.8 at 4.8.2 build 191. so what we're downloading now is build 205 so a little bit newer i guess so here's that zip file i just downloaded i'm going to extract it so here's that folder and from other videos i've seen it's just a basic windows install click next and yes a couple times and you're done looks like there is a point here where we can choose some different components and it looks like a lot of file type support so the only one that's checked by default is open stl files with creality slicer so i think that's the standard file format we normally work in but once you export from the slicer it creates a g-code file that's why back to our sd card we've got stl files for each of the things i've been printing and we've also got g-code files so the g-code files are what the printer is using so my understanding you know basically we open the stl in our slicer slice it and then output the g-code file for the printer so why wouldn't we want to be able to open g-code files with creality slicer i mean i guess if something was sliced in another software it might present problems i don't know i want to go ahead and check it it's better to have the capability and not need it it's like it's wanting to install some serial drivers sure why not arduino drivers sure and we're done i got a firewall pop up and it looks like we're good now i will say i've had a lot of people recommend that i use the prusa slicer instead of the creality slicer so we may not spend much time in here but i just kind of want to open it up and try it anyway please take these steps to set up creality slicer okay get started sure disclaimer they're going to steal my information and sell it to the highest bidder like everybody else in the world sure and here i guess is the main reason i want to use creality slicer first because we need to pick our printer out of the list so here is the ender 3 s1 and i think this is going to fill in a lot of settings with default values that will hopefully be pretty close to what we need and since i don't know what any of those are might as well just stick with it and speaking of those settings i think this is what we're talking about yeah width depth height build plate shape etc g code flavor the default set to marlin not sure what that means we're not going to touch it okay over under extruder let's see what this one says compatible material diameter some offset stuff okay next hey we're in i did see on another video this middle dialog here where you choose your material type and your nozzle size if you shrink the screen it disappears so you don't see that unless you've got it at least that wide so what i'd like to try and do is open up one of the files we've been printing the file open file here are the files on my sd card so looks like we could open up the stl or the gcode files let's see if we can open up one of the g-code files and let's do this one right here this is that coin that i was so interested in all right i got to figure out how to navigate in here see okay i can zoom it's like a couple different view options down here on the left so let's see 3d view front view top view okay let's look at this top view looks like my options are limited i put up here it's saying print setup disabled gcode file cannot be modified let's go to preview and i wanted to see if it would show us the slices yeah here we go okay let's see if we can zoom in on this looks like i have to right click to move things around maybe okay so here we can look at layer by layer so there's our first layer i want to move i want to get up until it starts to fill in you know this gap right here this is the part of that coin that just doesn't really make much sense to me and right there it is that's crazy i still don't understand it like it's doing exactly what i thought it's doing it's just jumping the gap all the way across so i guess all of that sagging and rough texture is just how it is huh pretty neat all right let's open up this exact same thing all right so let's close this can't see anything with this giant cursor i see new project and save project but no close project all right screw it we'll just go open file this time let's get the stl file okay now i'll tell you let's go back to the prepare portion of things and let's go back to my standard view can't really see much can you alright well down here on the right let's go to slice okay slice complete and it's showing this is a an approximately 28 minute print so let's go to preview okay looks like there's two view types layer view is what we're in now let's look at the x-ray view okay i think a tiny flat coin probably not the best choice here we'll switch over to something more interesting here in just a second okay so we can choose which types we want to see i guess this was prob would probably be important on a print where you have a lot of infill and wanted to see i guess you know we just don't have any infill on this print and let's see standard quality as soon as i change this it looks like it killed our slice so we have to re-slice everything so so the 0.2 shows up as standard quality if i switch it to 0.28 it calls that low quality 0.16 is dynamic quality and 0.12 is super quality i'll tell you what i want to try and do let's leave it at standard quality but let me look here under custom looks like there's a bunch of other crap build plate adhesion type skirt brim raft or none so i think the skirt is the single line around the the outside that we've been seeing if we did a brim i think that line would extend all the way to the actual object and i think raft makes it thicker i don't know we'll come back and play with that maybe okay here's here's what i was looking for was the print temperature and the build plate temperature it is affected by default printing temperature i think that's what we need to do is we need to find the default printing temperature okay i think i found it it's up here under preferences and configure creality and then it's under materials and here's all of our stuff and then under print settings it won't allow me to adjust that why won't it allow me to adjust that all right i guess what we've got to do is we've got to select generic pla and cr and click on duplicate perhaps it's warning me about things that are changing but i don't see any change sure keep changes okay now i've got the generic pla i just made uh what was that brand name inland we'll call it inland pla and now i have an inland option lower down here so now let's see if i can go no it looks like you got you got one shot or maybe maybe you can only mess with it when it's not active okay i think that's what's going on so let's go back to generic pla and let's activate it sure keep changes now my inland pla i can adjust again so if i go to print settings i could change that to 220. build plate 60 everything else the same okay just going to look back through those settings and make sure they're everything else is the same except that temperature yep that's it so now my inland pla i'm going to activate so now if i click up here and look at my settings yep print temperature 220 good deal so here's what i'd like to try let's slice this thing up i'm going to save it to file i'm going to call it first slice test and click save now it's got me a little bit worried here so my my file is 1240 kilobytes the file i've been printing is this one right here this bit underscore ender zi is the coin file it's 1550 kilobytes i bet theirs is maybe higher quality so i'm gonna go put this file on the printer and we'll let it run shouldn't take long to print so i'm gonna transfer it over to an sd card and we'll see what happens okay standard quality straight off the printer i already see that big string right there and just overall poorer quality here's the here's the one from the file on the sd card all right let's pop this off and see how all those big bridges did yep another funky string there and a little more open space i think oh that's interesting laid them down in different directions now that we look at it again it doesn't look worse does it now if anything there's voids yep these voids right here on the original are not there on our new file interesting there's the spot on the edge where the i guess the nozzle probably changes direction that's our new file here's the old file old file on the bottom new file on the top all right a little bit confusing if it wasn't for this it wasn't for that little guy right there and it's counterpart over here on the other side i would say the quality is about the same and i guess the lettering just being just crappier in general confusing results i'll tell you what here's what i want to do let's go ahead and try all of the different settings so here's low quality what happened to the simplified view with the sliders i wonder if that's only under prepare no yeah i'm not sure but that's what i want to do i want to create files on low quality standard quality dynamic quality and super quality and print each one out it's all right low quality keep changes and then slice all right there's coin low quality and i'm going to go ahead and print standard quality again just to see if we run into that same stringing or bridging i'm not can't remember which one they call that but i want to see if we run into that again so let's slice it and save it okay so now i've got my four files and the file size definitely does get bigger as the quality gets better so if i go back to the original one that came with the that came on the memory card it was 1550 and my dynamic quality is 1591 so maybe dynamic quality is going to be what gets us back to the original file i don't know should be a fun test now after i finish these i also want something i can kind of let run overnight and everything i've printed so far for has been very short so i pulled up thingiverse or thingyverse and i guess it's showing us things that have been popular in the last 30 days let's click through until something pops out at us not really seeing anything that's particularly tall let's just search vase nothing more generic for testing a 3d printer than a vase right here's here's one that looks pretty cool spiral vase says it's 150 millimeters high i think if we go to thing files spiral double spiral let's grab double double spiral base 1.stl i want to make a thingiverse folder so i can try and keep track of where this stuff comes from all right let's open it up and see what it looks like all right let's go new project and then open it up yeah that looks like a good test so we've got our inland pla profile selected so that should give us our 220 degree nozzle temperature and which quality should we check oh maybe this is maybe if i click this recommended there it is what do you think standard quality or actually since i'm i'm going to let it run overnight so let's pick that dynamic quality now let's see adhesion enable printing a brim or raft this will add a flat area around or under your object which is easy to cut off afterwards yeah we'll try it without it haven't really been having any adhesion problems have we okay let's slice it that way and see what it looks like holy crap estimated time one day one hour and 57 minutes let's go over the preview see what it looks like seems pretty straightforward it's just i guess kind of intricate and tall let's see if we if we switch to standard quality how much time is that going to save us and i have seen other people say that not to trust that estimated time didn't really save us all that much time 21 hours 15 minutes four or five hours ah screw it yeah we'll go with that let's go with the standard quality so all right i'm going to save this to file on what this file size is going to look like 41.2 megs okay good deal i'll talk to you guys again when i've got all that printed out holy crap [Music] [Music] so this vase came out awesome all the fine little details look great a couple little strings down here nothing i'm going to worry about just really good stuff and here are four different quality coins start with low quality and standard quality see low quality definitely looking pretty rough not too much difference on that side a pretty big change on this side i forgot to write down how long it took to print the low quality but standard quality was 33 minutes and the dynamic quality which is really where we see a big improvement it actually printed a little bit faster at 32 and the file size was bigger on this so must have just been more efficient movement of the print head or something so pretty pretty big improvement there and then if we look at dynamic versus super quality see that one took 49 minutes not really seeing a lot i guess here on the back this is the dynamic quality and definitely got some texture there but if we look at the super quality it's a little bit better but not by all that much they look pretty similar tell you what let me line up all the seams that is probably the easiest place to tell the difference so i think i'm you know the the dynamic quality that generic dynamic quality selection seems to be the best trade-off because it was definitely significantly faster printing than the super quality but a noticeable improvement over standard with little time change i'm sure that'll change depending on the print you know i'm sure there are other print jobs where you know maybe this is significantly longer i'm not in a big hurry so i think dynamic is the way i want to go here in the short term that was so cool watching the printer lay down these big bridges really pretty amazing stuff so what's next so i printed these several days ago and then took a little time to edit this video up to this point to kind of see where we're at on time i mean this was always going to be a long video but just kind of wanted to know where i'm at to know how much more do i want to take on from this point because the the entire subject of tuning the printer like calibrating the extruder so that it's actually feeding the exact amount of filament that it thinks it is and there's an offset we can change the nozzle retraction distance and the nozzle nozzle retraction speed can be adjusted you know we've already been playing around some with temperature i don't think i want to get into any of that much deeper but one thing i definitely do want to do is try out our other two types of filament so the pla plus and the petg so what i'd like to do next is run all three of these through a a temperature tower which should give us a lot of information about each and then i want to move on to designing something for myself i've even decided what i want to make this thing right here is my ninja monitor recorder it's what i'm recording this video on right now now normally these go up on top of a camera or something like that right we've got a quarter inch screw hole there but i don't want i don't want this thing on a tripod i like to be able to just set it somewhere that i can see it but also be able to move it around but with the battery eliminator and the hard drive on there and an hdmi cable plugged in it wants to fall so i just want to make a little stand for it something very simple we can actually probably make use of our screw hole there to anchor it in just a basic little plastic cradle that will support this thing when i want to set it down so modeling that slicing that printing that and doing our temperature towers with the with the different filaments if everything goes well with all that that's probably the scope of this video that's what we're going to try and accomplish so let's start with getting our temperature tower set up so one thing i forgot to mention is the pla i went ahead and vacuum sealed it this is just standard food saver vacuum sealer bags and i maybe should have stopped it before it pulled this hard but you can see it got a nice seal i put the the desiccant pack that came with in the original packaging i went ahead and put it in there so this is kind of my plan for storing filament to keep it out of the moisture and the good thing about these bags i'll be able to cut this off and reseal it 10 times before i need to replace it or i could just make the bag longer you know this is from those rolls where you just cut it to whatever size you want so that's the plan so you'll see i put the pla in this because like i mentioned it's been a few days i wanted to edit the video up to this point and since i started this i i turned like it's it's the middle of winter and i normally run a humidifier in my house because it gets really dry but i turned that off and humidity in the house dropped down into the 30s but after about a week of that man my nose never stops bleeding so pla got sealed up humidifier got turned back on and i'm going to be honest with you i don't think it's a big deal on this short of a time frame right this is whenever you're either in an extremely humid environment or a package has been open a really long time i get the feeling that's you know when you should really worry about it but i don't know for sure so uh one of my viewers had sent me a link to some really nice plans for a dry box where you put this into a little humidity controlled box and then it just feeds into the printer straight from there and i think i'll probably build one of those because just like the humidity gets low in my leaky house in the winter it gets extremely high in the summer so having a dry box is probably a good idea for me so i had a live stream the other night and we were talking about slicers and the ultimaker cura here you go ultimaker.com this is the software that our creality slicer is based off of and this is the one most people were recommending i was thinking it was the the prusa slicer and i know i know some people have definitely recommended that one as well but seemed like cura was the most popular now with my ender 3s1 the problem is it hasn't been added to the software yet so ender 3 and ender 3 pro are the options we've got for a generic setup so i'm going to choose enter 3 i'm going to go ahead and install this software it installs exactly like the other one and actually at this point we might be able to open up the other one and just compare the settings for ourselves so if i go up here and go to manage printers and here's machine settings okay so this is the exact same window we've got over here in cura it doesn't look like any of this is editable yes it is it looks like x and y need change to 220 z need to switch to 270. it looks like those build plate sizes are the only difference except cura has got this additional option here apply extruder offsets to g-code and it is enabled all right we'll just we'll go with it we'll leave it checked and we're done i'm wondering trying to see if there was a way to like duplicate yeah add that's what i should have done i guess i could just go ahead and change the name here to add the s1 and i'm going to take a minute to look through all of these other settings so if you remember earlier we created the inland pla material profile so i want to do the same thing over here so i created material profiles for inland petg pla and pla plus pretty big difference with cura compared to the creality slicer if we look at the generic pla profile in the creality software you look at this retraction distance is point eight millimeters in cura gener generic pla it's five millimeters that's a big difference there's a little bit of difference in the retraction speed as well creality has 40 millimeters per second and cura has 45 what i've done for my inland profiles is i matched what we've already seen works in the creality slicer they also have a lower default build plate temperature of 50 where we've been running 60. with all these you know build plate adhesion issues i'm having with things sticking too much dropping that down might not be a bad idea but at least for now i'm going to leave it at 60 and the petg profile is 70. the other big difference in the petg profile is that the fan speed is set to 50 percent where with the pla it's 100. so i think we're in good shape you know i didn't see this earlier but looking over here like i noticed that like so whenever i've got the pla plus selected it doesn't even recognize that says there are no profiles there are no profiles matching the configuration of this extruder i was going to go through and look at some of the other brands and see if there was a pla pro or pla plus it looks like there's a bunch of them like here's e sun pla plus and that gives that same error so okay okay so i guess that's what's going on is whenever you choose one that gets the yellow exclamation mark you get not supported over here and i guess you have to go to custom and do some of that stuff well i'll tell you what let's just go ahead and let's go ahead and just grab the files for the temperature calibration tower so each one of these segments it prints at a different temperature and it checks overhang and the bridging that's been blowing my mind and fine little points and stuff so it just does a bunch of different tests at different temperatures so i downloaded the file for pla there's one for pla plus and one for petg so let's open up actually i want to open up the pla plus one so the pla one goes from 180 to 225 degrees pla plus is 195 to 235 and petg is 220 to 265. well our brand of pla says the recommended temperatures are 215 to 230 we've already been printing at 200 so we know it works lower but i don't feel the need to go all the way down to 180 with this one so let's go with the pla plus tower and maybe this will actually work for both the pla and the pla plus because all the other settings between pla and pla plus right now at least i want them to be the same so we've got our dynamic quality selected and as far as infill goes i don't think there's any spots we're going to be doing in infill so let's just slice this and see what it says or see what it looks like so what i want to do is try and find out the exact layer where one finishes and the other begins it's got to be a way to increment up and down one okay yeah up and down arrow so layer number 85 is the first layer of the second segment so i'm just going to start up a text document here 235 is one through 84. okay so i think i've got all of my values so for 230 degrees that should begin on the 85th row or 210 degrees should begin on the 393rd row so if we go to 393 there's 390 390 1 2 3. yep that's the first row of that 210 segment so we want it to start at 235 and i guess the easiest way to set that initial temperature is over here we'll make that 235 so hopefully that's good looks like we need to slice again hopefully that doesn't mess up my layer count see 393 is the first yep looks like it is so there's 392 that's the last layer of that guy and then there's the next one okay so what we have to do at this point is go under extensions and go to post processing and modify gcode but you know what before i do that i want to save this one to disc let's call it pla temp tower 195 to 235 and i'll save that one or i should have given that a i should have given that a different name we'll call that before edit okay now back to extensions post processing modify gcode it brings up these post processing scripts and if we add a script and choose the top one change at z we can do things like change the extruder temp at either a specific height or we can choose layer number so obviously i want to choose layer number and i saw somebody mention the comments for this file that in the g code it's the counting starts at zero so where where i calculated the 85th layer is our first one for 230 i think i actually need to put in 84. we'll see if we can figure that out but i don't think it really matters all that much so layer number 84 we want to apply this to the target layer and the subsequent layers we want to change the extruder temp to 230 and then we need to add another script same thing change at z layer number 161 so that's this one minus one we want to change the extruder temp to 225. okay i think i got them all here so we've got eight different changes and i should be able to hit close and we've got this little thing down here showing that we've got scripts to run so we need to slice again and we'll save that one to disk that took a couple minutes to save but our file sizes are exactly the same what i wanted to do here was use a simple program called exam diff i assume these are clear text files yeah they're just plain text so if i bring these over here into exam diff we can look and see what the differences actually are it looks like a little flag here that says there was post processing it's like just a couple lines here i'm not sure what m and t are but s230.0 looks like our temperature change to 230 and there's the next one 225. so it looks like it's just adding a couple additional lines to make that temperature change it's got me wondering i'm not quickly finding an explanation for that i'll have to look up look that up later not that it matters i was just curious okay so i want to take this file to the printer and run it on both pla and pla plus and then i'm going to create one of these for petg which we need to go a little bit higher in temperature okay i think i got my petg file ready to go but the problem with this is it goes to 265 degrees and my ender 3 s1 has a maximum nozzle temperature of 260. so i'm going to start it at 260 and just these first two will be both 260. then the rest will go like normal up to 220. i wouldn't mind going lower than that because so the box for the petg says 225 to 240. so i'm going hotter than i really need to and i think i've read this petg puts off funky fumes at high temp so i'm not really all that interested in in this in the high temp side and i kind of wish it went a little bit lower but i think i'm just going to roll with this for the first test might as well might as well test out that max nozzle temperature now anyway right so in my extensions i've got all of these set up and ready to go i've got my petg profile selected same dynamic quality so we'll just go with this and see what happens now one thing i'll mention now one thing i should probably mention is that whenever you use these extensions they stay there so we could close this project close the software open it back up these are still going to be here so you either need to remember to come in and delete them or you can uncheck this box to disable them i think that's what i'm going to do because it's kind of a pain in the butt to add them and once we uncheck this one this should go away i think okay it says the following scripts are active so why is it still showing them active they're not enabled eh whatever i'm going to leave it like it is for now so the next thing i want to do is go over into tinkercad and start trying a very basic design for my little monitor holder i think the best way to go about this since i have no idea what i'm doing might be to just mess around here for a while and then check in with you guys once i get my bearings and start making some progress [Music] [Music] guys i think i've got something i want to print it's about as simple as it gets but that's all i'm looking for just a basic little cradle for this monitor got a little locator pin sticking up there which i'm still not sure i've got that placed right but let me let me talk about some basics here so the biggest revelation was learning that if you right click and hold it down that's how you move your view around and it makes life pretty simple so we bring in shapes here from the right and you know there's a lot of different stuff you can choose from this has all been boxes and cylinders so i'm sure there's a more elegant way to do this but so like i want to chop the the sharp top off of this so if i bring a transparent box over which it gives you the option to switch between a solid box or i don't know what they call it like an elimination zone change to hole so they call it a hole so i just want to chop a little bit off the top of this so if i stretch this out the next difficult thing that took me a while so if you click at the white corners it shows you numbers and stuff and if you click here it shows you the height and you can adjust the height click and drag or you can put in a number but i actually had to do a quick search to find out how to raise something above the workspace and it's the little black arrow here at the top if you click it then you can go upward so if we just leave that hanging and then spin around here should be able to drag that it's a little bit clunky like you kind of got to be just the right angle to drag things the way you want them so that's going to chop that sharp point off the top i mean i guess i could probably just bring it down i need to come down just a little bit farther i think that that got it all so if we eliminate all of that i think we'll be okay and to do that i guess you select both objects and then up here there's a group option so if we group them it'll make that change stick and you can undo things and you know control z to undo a change i like that better when it was a little higher we'll give that a try or if i wanted a brace here we could go maybe we could make this thinner so this is a whole bunch of grouped shapes so if i let's say i wanted to make this thinner let me go up here to ungroup i guess you got to keep on clicking it until it ungroups everything hmm not really sure yeah i don't think it's going to give me access just to edit this or no that's that's all that's selected okay got it so i select it and now i can see its footprint below it so if i just wanted to make it thinner it doesn't really matter that i'm going to mess up that angle because i've already chopped it off anyway so i think i could click here no why does it move the whole thing it's ctrl z that ain't it either well let's just do it this way anyway so that makes it thinner and then i can grab the angle here and tilt it back oh no i need to select something that's inside of that something else all right let's just undo it yeah all i've really done here is make a mess let me undo bunch of stuff okay i think we're back to normal now maybe i could maybe it would be easier to do an elimination i know what we could try yeah let's see if i could pull that off okay that's a start now if i rotate it the base stay no there's got to be a way to rotate it or to change the anchor point i guess is probably what i need to do all right i'm just making a mess at this point but that's that's okay made it a little thinner tell you what let's go ahead and group that which gives me this weird spot on the back that i need to fix but that should be easy enough we'll just sink a basic square right down in there and call it good yeah that's fine a little bit of a weird angle there that shouldn't be a shouldn't be a big deal tell you what just because the printer is busy printing the temperature towers right now let's add something stupid how about a brick wall oops i think i accidentally added an extra one okay let's uh what can we do with a brick wall let's bring it over here and let's tilt it crap let's try this again brick wall reinforced yeah let's do that all right i need to trim the other end i think this is the wrong square yeah that's the wrong square ctrl z let's try another view okay all right that's pretty close i don't like them poking out the top there so let's see if we can actually i would need to go down just a smidge right and then maybe bring it over okay how's that a little bit weird i guess we'd go ahead and just get rid of that overhang all right i'm cool with this sweet so what i need to do now is export oh i see it's only including the selected shape let me make sure i don't have yeah we don't want anything selected let's try this again yeah okay everything in the design oh looks like you can send directly to a printer that's pretty cool we want the stl preparing model for export this thing's really taking its time it's been at least a minute so far i would imagine there it is and we'll save it so in cura let's go new project and open my cradle we'll set this up for pla seems like the safe bet and for a first print of this guy i probably don't want to go ahead and use the high quality i want to use low quality so we'll have to look at the infill percentage here there's nothing that needs support that i don't think and can't imagine a big base like this would need adhesion so let's go ahead and slice it and they're still my scripts here i'm going to get rid of these just to just to be sure don't want to screw something up all right let's slice it real quick and see what the infill looks like we're coming down which i think there we go you see how it's adding that infill to the interior parts that seems like a lot of infill especially for uh you know just a test print really yeah let's remove that yeah let's drop that info a little bit so right now it's saying nine hours 41 minutes let's put it to 10 percent what i say nine hours 40 something minutes eight hours two minutes and that's what it looks like let's do it at zero yep here we don't get anything so i can't imagine that would work because those are some pretty massive bridges yeah right here layer 86 probably not going to work out all right let's go back to 10 percent infill slice it again and now we've got our stuff back all right i'm going to save the disk i'm going to finish my temperature towers and then print this and then i'll check back in with you guys so i don't have all the temperature towers done but i wanted to skip this thing in line and get our first example printed out so i have not test fitted this at all so let's see if we're anywhere close i already think we're in trouble i don't have enough relief here for the power cable i don't think but let's see if this [Music] okay my post is a little bit too big let's see what our clearance looks like it's not too bad but it's not too good either right let me let me remove the power cable assuming i can get this thing out of here there it is okay without the power cable yeah once it gets to the to the proper angle that post is just about correct let's see what we look like back here like listen it ain't perfect the post is too far forward so it's swiveling on it this part's too high so we don't have power cable clearance listen like as a concept that's good it's doing exactly what i'm hoping it'll do i definitely need to tighten this up though because you know working on the touch screen with it pivoting on there would be super annoying guess the design is just so simple that even low quality comes out looking okay and there's a couple spots here it did pick up some of the leftover plastic that had been sitting on my my build plate like it feels strong i mean heck even this little thing right here definitely flexible see what it takes to break it yeah that's pretty darn strong without a model of the monitor in tinkercad it was really kind of hard to judge some of these distances like i think for that post what i did was grab my calipers and just kind of try and eyeball that distance because i think perfectly profiling this would be a challenge outside of my capabilities you know what i'm saying too many too many small changes and little nuances okay so that was a wonderful little failure i want to get to work on revision number two here is the pla tower that has finished the most obvious things i see like up here at 195 and 200 see how we got some funky stuff going on there at the the tip of our little spike and then there's this area of pretty good from around 205 to 215 and then the higher temperatures the bridges start falling apart and we get some spaghetti going on in here as well like looking at the different overhangs at the different temperatures those look fine and we definitely started getting a lot of wispy little hairs up here on the low end wasn't necessarily expecting that so the pla plus test is running right now and i've still got to do the petg test so i've got a couple hours to work on revision two before the printer's available [Music] so so [Music] so [Music] [Music] okay i think i've got three designs ready to slice up and try this is the updated cradle design played around a little bit with some with some recessed lettering and adding some voids so i'm not sure which one is more efficient like trying to skeletonize designs or just leaving them the way they are and then relying on your slicing software and the automatic infill to take care of all that right it's going to print hollow so hollow with infill may actually be better than something like that i don't know i thought it would be fun to print out and see i think i've got the placement of my locator pin a little bit better i widened this part chop this side lower to clear that cable and then added these chains to hold everything up so i did add a solid solid piece going through the middle of the chain because i think this chain actually i know this chain if you zoom in on it it is it's actual chain links so i wanted to freeze all of those together so there it is pretty goofy but if the monitor fits well on it i'll be happy so i need to export this as an stl and then we'll be ready to slice so here is the second one so i'm going to print it like this which everything below the plane will get deleted so a lot of little places i had to think about support or making sure that one of the letters wasn't disconnected from everything else i think i've got everything touching that needs to touch but you know what now that i say that look at that see right there ah whatever we'll leave it but i did have to add this little support or else this little guy would just be hanging out in the middle of nowhere to try and center this a little bit looks good right there let's export that and the last one's right here i have a feeling you know this one in particular but maybe the last one as well will be pretty disappointing because a lot of the details that are popping right now because of their color we might not even be able to tell what they are let me see if i can change yeah looks like i can change this yeah that might not be too bad so this design here we're definitely going to need at least one support in the slicer to hold up the end of this f at least i think so so i imagine the slicer will create a support that comes down to the base here perhaps i don't know i thought it would be a fun test so let's export that one as well and we're good to go tinkercad has been a lot of fun to play around with it's just figuring out how to move and whenever you select something figuring out what each of these dots is going to do and there's a ton of stuff that i know there's got to be a simple way to do it and i'm just missing it like i'd love to know how to just select everything and do rescaling although this one's not allowed because this this skull head has got scaling locked because over in this fun and game section there's all sorts of different pieces that i guess fit together perfectly and they don't want you to be able to mess up the scaling so that really set the size of this whole design and i had to work around that tinkercad is kind of slow some of it may have to do with my pretty slow internet but i don't think so it's probably on their end it wasn't really a problem it just confused me at the beginning because so i would make a change and expect it to happen instantly and sometimes like if you're making a big change it can take 30 seconds for it to take effect okay let's go over to cura slicer open up the tell you what we'll do this one first since i know it's going to need a support wow it got mirrored which i think is easy to change over here or am i losing it yeah we're okay i think boy lost a lot of detail coming over from tinkercad didn't we maybe not so so far i'm done with the pla and the pla plus temperature towers the petg is running right now i'm going to set this up for pla and we'll go with the dynamic quality and we need to check support because like i said that f i know we're going to need something so let's see what that gives us holy mother of supports yeah this is crazy could probably do with a lot less infill as well let me move infill from 20 down to 10 and let's see if i go to custom let's see if there's any better adjustments under support generate support support placement okay it's set to everywhere we definitely don't want everywhere touching build plate let's see if let's see what that changes if just changing to touching build plate yeah that got rid of all of them okay so let's go back to everywhere but right now the support overhang angle is 51 so i guess that means everything more than 51 percent gets or 51 degrees so i guess that means everything over 51 degrees gets a support let's try moving that to like 60. let's see what we get still a lot going on okay let's go crazy let's call it 80 80 degrees all right we're getting better i guess the bottom part of that skull has just got some crazy overhangs which we could go back to tinkercad and get rid of this yeah that that's what's going on it doesn't look like we're going to have the resolution to fill out these fingertips some reason they're looking a little bit a little sparse let's open up the other one and see if it's also going to be a pain in the butt uh pla we'll tell it it can add supports and slice well doesn't look like we generated any supports did we that's good oh there they are so yeah this one was supposed to be i want to try and move some of this below the down below the build plate or whatever but uh it's so frustrating just trying to learn how to navigate these programs so this the tip of the fingers over there is where i wanted come on okay i think that's about right let's slice it again let's bring the infill down to ten percent it was about an eight hour print just now and it says about the same you know what let's give it a shot it looks like it didn't even try to do the the trigger no big deal for now see if we can actually get this off of the build plate i bet we can't like especially like those the little fingers or this o that doesn't make much connection i'm going to come back and work on this this it doesn't look right the lettering looks totally different yeah i want to take some time to work on that but hopefully the new cradle for the monitor won't be quite as bad i could probably go get a bit deeper on that lettering but that's fine it's just a just a quick test looks like i'm one layer off maybe right here yep and the remnants of our old brick wall there definitely some more cleanup i could do on this but i don't want to let's go 10 infill stick with our dynamic quality actually i need to set the print temperature which i'm going to go with 210 and let's slice it which let's enable generate support and see where it puts it or if it puts it anywhere yep it puts the ports under there and in our little hole i'm just going to leave them off and we'll see what happens i'm going to put it on low quality there we go low quality 210 degrees says it'll be a nine hour print so we'll see how that goes so i'm going to take a little time see if i can get one of these designs to go into the slicer a little cleaner and we'll go from there i guess [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay all three temperature towers are done we already looked at the pla tower a little bit and the droops on the overhang at the higher temperatures was the main problem down there and then up at the top things get kind of stringy so with these settings 210 and 215 are what i think is the best and the pla plus is pretty much identical at the higher temperatures we got the the droopy stuff a couple spots right there and then up at the other end with the low temperatures we got the exact same sort of nonsense going on there at these on these two so once again 210 215 looks the best to me with these settings so pretty much identical performance with the two inland filaments the biggest problem was the pla plus was a huge pain in the butt to scrape off of the bed so i think i'm going to play around a little bit with bed temperature i've been running the 60 degrees on both of these so maybe something a little lower would help with the pla plus now i kind of get the idea you want to be as hot as you can because that leads to stronger parts i guess at lower temperatures there can be problems with the layers adhering to one another and being weak easy to crack easy to delaminate so maybe one of these days i'll decide i want to start bumping up my temperatures and then all of the other settings we've discussed could clean up the issues here it's a lot like reloading you change one variable and everything else changes right bed temp nozzle temp fan speed and all of that retraction distance retraction speed and so many more that i'm not even aware of so here's our p e t g tower and if you'll recall both of the two bottom ones are both 260. so 265 was too hot for my nozzle we have got a mess look at these first few and it really doesn't get much better until we get right up here to the last one or two 220 and 225 are a whole lot better than the rest but they're not quite good enough here's this other side starting from the bottom the overhangs seem okay for the most part or at least they're not terrible it was navigating this bridge and coming to that little point that were a real struggle so the default profile for petg had the fan setting at 50 50 so maybe trying a different fan speed and printing a couple of these or maybe it's the retraction speed or retraction distance i don't really know and i got to be honest with you i don't think i really care right now i'm glad i bought this spool to test with and i want to get back to it and get it figured out but right now i'm just having so much success with the pla it seems like the best use of my time is learning how to use the 3d modeling software and picking out which one i want to use long term or playing around with the slicer and trying to figure out how to get it to make supports just like i want those sorts of things so petg is just going to have to wait until i either come up with a scenario where i need it because i guess its biggest advantage is more heat resistance it can handle a little bit higher heat and right now i just don't really have an application that demands that so i'll just play with pla until i get bored with 3d modeling stuff so right now i'm printing out my my two custom designs and i'm going to go ahead and do them with the pla plus just because i'm tired of that color just want to make some green stuff so i've got them set up for 210 and they're running now so we'll have a look once they're done so this came out awesome but it's also a complete and total dumpster fire of a failure at the same time so i showed you two designs earlier and just kind of distilled it down into one little pencil holder so we'll come back to this guy here in just a minute i can't wait any longer well i better show you one of the big flaws before we try and put the monitor on there just a little bit of stringing there off of our little post which is hopefully now in the correct spot all right moment of truth all right it goes on there ah hang on am i there's no way i'm that dumb i moved it the wrong way didn't i hm actually i need to go get the hard drive stand all by let's slide that guy in see if that changes things yeah i think i'm a but then again maybe not maybe it's just pivoting right there hmm yeah that may be it all right let's check our power cable clearance should have plenty now oh yeah yeah plenty of room for the power cable and i guess now that i think about it my record buttons on the left i rarely ever tap over on this side so maybe it'll end up being okay let's have a look at some of the other details the chain links are not the prettiest thing you've ever seen in your life but they're still pretty cool a little bit of a little bit of loose stuff there the text came out pretty good remember this was low quality so a lot of this is just expected let's look at our hole through there a little bit of drooping at the top as it was closing that hole got a little bit droopy kind of pretty happy with that yeah pretty darn happy with that all right back to our pencil holder this was the best way i could come up with you know both of the other designs i showed earlier were just unprintable especially at my current knowledge level so printing this guy like this was something i thought i could get away with i was going to leave the whole box off and just print this last little bit which is probably what i'll do as i continue to work on this and refine it and then once i'm happy with the facade i can add i can add the container back in on the back because okay so most obvious failure is right there so you know it was sitting on the build plate like this so not a huge surprise but i'd say my biggest failure at this point was that these walls are too thick and it printed them hollow it seems like maybe going thinner and solid could reduce the print time by a bunch so problem number one wall thickness way off just wasn't even really paying attention to it wasn't even thinking about it the next part i wasn't expecting is whenever it got to the front and started doing some of the details like all hell was breaking loose it was leaving big voids and doing all sorts of crazy bridges on some of the gaps i i really didn't think it was going to come out but it did so biggest problem on the front we got a couple strings going between the skull and the gun which should come loose pretty easily i imagine and you can see a little closer what i did with the skull i gave him this big double chin well at the time i was going to be printing it this way and needed to get rid of that chin overhang so if i'm going to continue to print it this way i could basically eliminate that i kind of like him with a double chin though right he's more relatable you can also see inside of the eyes and down here in the cheeks there's a perfect sphere back there like all of the voids and the minor details inside that was the best way i found to get rid of most of them was just to create a sphere in tinkercad and then sink it inside the skull and bring it out as much as i could without you know losing the detail i needed and i think that actually worked out really well so i'm going to be doing a whole bunch more work on this because i kind of like the design just as a concept but since all of the individual parts came out of tinkercad i'm not really sure what the licensing terms are so i want to start from scratch and do just kind of a totally original design especially like the skull is locked in so i can't scale it any larger so it's another good reason why i just want to make another one so i'm going to keep working on this one hopefully clean up all of this stuff but then also nail down some better methods for the walls like i mentioned and get something that would print a whole lot faster this took forever it was 13 hours or 12 hours maybe something like that so if you want to follow my progress i did create an account over on thingiverse so i'll make sure to leave a link to that in the description along with a whole bunch of other links from just about everything we talked about today as far as the build plate goes it looks like i can get a replacement for twelve dollars so not a big deal there and you know this one i'm sure has a lot of life still left in it and the more i scrape it the smoother it gets things do seem to be coming off easier you know that brand new surface that's very gritty was just a nightmare so maybe you already have a 3d printer if you've had problems getting stuff to stick man try this out and apparently when you buy them it comes with both you know this part and also the magnet part that goes on the bed so it seems like it's pretty easy to retrofit this stuff one thing i don't know is like if i wanted to try a glass bed i'm not sure what steps i would need to take i assume it would probably be very simple so this was exactly what i was hoping for right straight out of the box and i'm immediately having success so i don't know how i could be upset about the ender 3s1 it's done everything i've asked for so i think that's pretty much it hopefully somebody out there will find this helpful or entertaining pretty darn easy to get started i'm pretty excited that i can you know focus in on the modeling and efficient slicing and that sort of stuff instead of the non-stop tinkering that i thought might be necessary all right that's enough for now see you guys next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 199,968

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Id: voAZgzUZjQ8

Length: 119min 33sec (7173 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 13 2022