How a 3DBenchy can tell where your 3D prints need improvement

the 3d benchy what is it why do so many people print it and most importantly how can you use it to improve your 3d [Music] prints [Music] this one is a patreon request and it should be quite suitable for beginners but hopefully there's something for experience hands at the end of the video too the topic is this the 3d benchy and if you're new to 3d printing you're probably wondering why you see them everywhere a 3d benchy in case you didn't know is an object on thingiverse created by creativetools.se the benchy is incredibly popular if we look at all things on thingiverse sorted by the amount of likes we can see that it comes in second with almost 52 000. and if we now sort by the number of makes we can see that it is the most popular object on thingiverse so why is it so popular well i think it's because it's got character as well as being a useful diagnostic tool this is an all-in-one 3d printer test another popular object on thingiverse its aim is to give your printer a range of torture tests so you can see how it's performing if we examine the stl we can see we have a bridging test a hole test an overhang test a place to test internal and external diameters and there's also some sections where we can measure to test for dimensional accuracy the trouble is it's a little bit large as you can see it takes up a fair amount of room on an end of three bed and our other issue is it takes around three hours to print despite this this model and its variants are still a really worthwhile test in fact i've used it in the past on the channel as a comparison print for a three-way shootout this is the micro remix and all of those features achieve their purpose when you're done with it however it's not exactly something that you want to retain and put on your shelf for display and that brings us back to the benchy the name benchy comes from the fact that it's a benchmark print as the title implies a 3d printing torture test although it looks like a cute little boat the benchy is actually packed with little features that you can use to determine how well your printer is printing and anywhere in your slicer that might need calibration as we can see it's really benchy is significantly smaller than the previous test that we looked at and with the same slicing profile it comes in at under a third of the time and unlike other benchmark prints this one has a lot of character and there's a range of accessories available if you really want to make the most of your printed benches even without decorations they still may be worth keeping as filament samples if you were to print one for each new filament that you try the spools can go into proper storage but the benches can be left somewhere handy for you to inspect and make the correct filament choice for your next project even if the 3d benchy fails to charm you with its appearance it's still a powerhouse due to its popularity i generally include them in my 3d printer reviews and that's because so many others have printed them too and that allows a direct comparison basically the more that are printed the more useful they become but what are we actually looking for when we compare prints to help us with this the 3d benchy actually has its own website at 3dbenchy.com and if we come up to the top menu we can come to the features and it will take us through the boat feature by feature telling us what to look out for we're going to use this as well as the measurement page and a few other things to examine some common 3d printing issues we're going to start from the bottom by examining the first layer a 3d benchy like any 3d print needs a great first layer to stay stuck to the bed the benchy is a model that offers information on how well tuned our first layer is thanks to all the detail needed to create this text this is how i think it should look you can just see the individual extrusions but overall they're fairly well merged and all of the letters are clear and legible on the bottom in this example the nozzle was too far from the bed you can see gaps in between the extrusions and the letters start to look pretty loose here the nozzle is too close to the bed the extrusion's all smooshed together and the letters are starting to disappear next up it's temperature and part cooling as the website correctly says the hull is an excellent area for examining print quality not only does it have a decent overhang that comes to a point but we also have radiant heat coming up from the printer bed the combination of these two things on this benchy was just too much and the hull is a mess this problem is often made worse when trying to print too fast for the part cooling later in the print we have some pretty narrow sections culminating in the chimney on top we can see here that the four posts of the cabin got quite hot during printing and in this example that combined high speed with a part cooling fan that was on the way out we can see the chimney becomes a blobby mess if your benches look anything like this you know that temperature and part cooling need some attention the same printer before the part calling fan was broken shows an entirely different result and what you can expect if your system is up to scratch on a benchy we're going to turn our attention to the surface finish looking for some artifacts despite being small the 3d benchy has some ideal surfaces for looking for these this one here was printed on the cetus mark 3 which is a printer that had the worst ringing of anything i've reviewed it takes a lot to see ringing on a benchy but sure enough you can see it on the top of the cabin with the outline of the arch repeated in what should have been a smooth and flat surface although not as common with the newer tmc stepper motor drivers i once used a benchy to test for stepper mode artifacts known as zebra stripes or salmon skin seen here as the diagonal stripes on what should be smooth surfaces they might be small but the flat surfaces on the benchy are still ideal for showing this next up we're going to examine retraction without 3d benchy at the start of the benchy everything is one connected surface but as we get a little bit higher the print will start to separate into islands near the top of the print we actually have multiple distinct areas where we need extrusion and then retraction in between them as the nozzle moves to the next area this is an example of when the retraction is pretty much perfect you can't see any stringing particularly inside the cabin and here's one that's not so good as we can see there's plenty of plastic that's oozed out of the nozzle as it's moved to a new area and we call this stringing but if that one's bad then here goes the ugly the benchy on the right was from a review printer with no slicer profile provided if the stringing is bad enough your benchy gets a free set of venetian blinds across its windows another relevant thing to talk about here are these zits on the layer changes the color does help but on my best benchy they're pretty much non-existent if yours are bad you'll find they'll be greatly exaggerated on the top of the chimney indicating some tuning to be done in the slicer next we're going to use the benchy to examine bridging and overhangs when printing the bench here we have a number of overhangs and bridges each of the windows has a round overhang with a tiny bridge in the middle and the front window has a relatively long bridge nothing however beats the bridge that makes up the entirety of the inner roof most people probably ignore this but it's a pretty handy indicator as to your printer's bridging performance here we're comparing our best benchy with the green one that had some overheating issues the bridge at the front of the cabin is quite good on both but when we turn our attention to the circular arch we can see that the green menchie lacks precision and it's a little bit messy under there and it's the same story at the rear window of the cabin it's hard to film this but the interior of the roof is printed in mid-air this yellow one's pretty clean this green one's not too bad either but not quite as good as a yellow a 3d benchy also provides an opportunity to evaluate fine detail most of our attention here should be at the back of the boat we have our little hole at the bottom this little protrusion with a hole at the top and some very faint text on the stern it's harder to see but inside we also have the steering wheel the text on the back is very shallow so there's a fair chance you won't see it depending on your filament color contrast helps like in this black benchy and this gold benchy 2. most printers should be able to produce the two other small details on the back of the boat as well as the steering wheel inside the cabin obviously if you print with the bigger layer height you're going to be giving up detail such as this text which is just a smudge the slicer also completely emitted the tube at the rear but once again the steering wheel inside is still there now we're going to look at some flat steep and shallow surfaces firstly we're looking at the vertical or near vertical surfaces on the hull and the side of the cabin we're looking to see if the layers are stacked cleanly but this is also a nice way to compare the appearance of various layer heights on the roof we have a shallow slope so we can examine the stair stepping effect of the stacked layers the benchy also has some flat or planar surfaces such as the top of the chimney this little box on the back and the floor as well for this gold benchy we can see it's pretty much spot on with no gaps between the extrusions and completely flat whereas the white one is a little bit bulgy on the chimney and there's some little gaps in between the individual extrusions so a higher flow rate or linear advance might help here next up roundness which can be an indicator if your belts aren't tensioned evenly this one's pretty simple we take some calipers to the chimney measure the width in one direction rotate 90 degrees and measure the width again and compare the yellow boat was good there's a tiny bit of variation on this green boat of around 0.2 millimeters and this white benchy returns equal measurements just 0.1 millimeters bigger than the yellow benchy you can also try this with the internal holes in the bow but they're very small and it's hard to get the calipers in for an accurate reading our final test is dimensional accuracy if we come to the measure and calibrate page on the website a series of dimensions are provided for us to compare our printed benchy 2 using some calipers this one should be self-explanatory take your calipers and use them to measure the various points around the benchy and if there's a trend for them to be too big or too small you know you need to tune your x and y dimensional accuracy if you need to tune this or any of the other areas we've examined might i suggest my free calibration website and companion video guide bonus segment the infamous thready benchy hull line this one is included just for your sanity you might have noticed on the side of some of my benches and maybe yours this horizontal line on the hull this may not be something that you can tune out which is explained well in this great article on the prusa 3d website the article makes a case for a theory and provides some fixes that you can try with good results but they do say that there's no universal fix as yet so please don't pull out your hair trying to eliminate that whole line once you have mastered the 3d benchy you can try the speedboat race challenge with the rules explained by annex engineering this basically involves printing a benchy as fast as possible while maintaining some degree of quality my patrons have started a friendly competition and we have been amazed by some of the entries found online this humble benchy can be quite polarizing so take to the comments and let me know if you think it's a useful tool or just a silly gimmick thank you so much for watching good luck tuning in the perfect benchy and if you accept the challenge good luck printing one in around six minutes g'day it's michael again if you like the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 198,303

Rating: 4.9630165 out of 5

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d print, 3d printed, 3dbenchy, benchmark, print test, test print, calibration, tool, how to, guide, print quality, improve, improvement, leson, tutorial, first layer, retraction, artefacts, artifacts, ghosting, ringing, vibration, problem, diagnose, slicer, settings, parameters, layer height, detail, bridg, bridging, hull line, prusa, overhangs, zits, layer lines, dimensions, dimensional accuracy, accurate

Id: t_7EMnQ6Rlc

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021