Jankiest 3D printing tips that actually work

sometimes you're in a hurry sometimes you just can't be bothered to do things the right way so today I share with you the dodgiest the jankiest 3D printing tips and shortcuts that actually [Music] [Music] work here are a few things to note about this video everything you're about to see is so far from Optimum I'm almost embarrassed to show it however as you'll see everything here is proven to actually work and be effective so please keep track as we have some fun and if you're brave you can own up in the comments as to which of these you've already used we're going to start by fixing it with fire we all know what stringing is right it's those little wisps of plastic that go between the parts of our model that aren't meant to be there we can fix this properly by drying out our filament or taking the time to do some retraction tuning or if we're in a hurry we can salvage these prints with some flame and I literally mean flame you could use a heat gun but that's not janky enough for me if you're going to do this you might as well do it properly with a naked flame all we do is light the torch and then apply it right on top of those fine wisps and with any luck they should melt away to pretty much nothing things to watch out for here are burning your hand that's pretty obvious and also leaving the torch too long in the same spot and melting the plastic avoid both of those and you can salvage your print that was pretty good and make it very good like you're seeing here I know that some of you are scoffing because that technique is not really uncommon but don't worry we can move the bar Lower how about some old school part cooling techniques most machines these days come with pretty powerful part cooling right out of the box and for cheaper printers that come with below average part cooling there's plenty of upgrade options available there too well back in my day my first 3D printer didn't even come within buil Park cooling we can see in this picture that's the nozzle and hot end hanging out the front with no ducks around it before we added specific part calling fans we used to use these ordinary desktop household fans and they in fact work really well the dustier the better which you can see here how about some proof with this torture test model by Simon which I've made even harder by scaling down to 50% and here it is in Black pla printed on a bamboo lab A1 Mini remember this is half scale so I think this is a pretty respectable result using stock profiles and a stock printer with the Baseline set I went into Ora slicer and disabled part cooling for the whole print mimicking my old solid doodle and we can verify this by setting the preview to fan speed which is zero the whole time and we can also see partway through the print that the park cooling fan is indeed stationary the result is not surprising it's hot garbage and part cooling is an important part of 3D printing especially with an Uzi filament like pla so what if we run the exact same G-Code with the big desktop fan BL across the printer and here is the result again we've gone back to respectable the cool air might not be directed as well but compared to the original it's definitely helping there's barely a difference between these two prints if we compare the three prints we can see that either side is really effective 3D printers do have part cooling built in but if you have a difficult model that needs a little part cooling boost putting a fan in front just like this might be just what you need that was pretty cool but now let's heat things up by going derit you can make a derit 3D printer enclosure pretty much for free one of my earliest videos on the channel was explaining what happens to ABS on an open frame printer I had a test model and some diagrams to show that temper variation throughout the part would lead to Thermal contraction which then created stressors that could tear the layers apart and if you've tou a print in ABS on an open frame printer you might have experienced failures just like this for a more upto-date demonstration I'm imported a cube into Orca slicer and scaled it to be a brick slicing it with abs settings I then loaded some old ABS into the p1p and hit print and to fool you the first layer always goes down well but if we return later on we can see the usual problem the corners are lifting off the bed but worst of all the internal stressors have ripped the brick in half to get around this you can buy a printer that's already enclosed buy an enclosure upgrade if it's sold by your manufacturer design and construct your own custom enclosure you could also also use a dedicated pop-up enclosure like this one from wamb bam it does work but honestly that's too professional for this video instead we are delving into the Jun bin specifically with a garbage bag meant for a wheelie bin you probably already have some large plastic bag sitting around and if you don't you can use a cardboard box or even cling film our aim is to completely enclose the printer to keep the temperature consistent but also to stop drafts from entering the print area in the case of this derel enclosure it's just a matter of pulling the bag the whole way down around the printer until it touches the table for educational purposes I set up a thermac couple inside attached to the printer's frame I then started the print with the exact same G-Code and monitored from oras slicer using the printer's inbuilt camera ambient temperature in my room was around 15° C but halfway through the print inside the bag I was recording a much toastier 33° so what effect does this have well let's answer that by looking at the finished print and as you can see printed on the same day with the same G-Code and filament it looks completely different in case you're undecided here's the two prints side by side on the left with no enclosure on the right with the derite enclosure not only has the part retained its shape but if we compare the bases we can see that the one with the plastic bag had no warping or lifting away from the bed this works amazingly well but a word of caution if the temperature inside the bag gets too hot for what your printer is designed to cope with it's possible the electronics won't be very happy so so proceed with caution although I've got plenty of CAD tutorials on this channel for this video instead I'm going to ask who needs CAD if you want to join two models together the fastest way to do it is just to overlap them in the slicer and technically we might get some errors telling us that the two tool paths are overlapping and there might be too much plastic in those spaces and if we preview inside the G-Code we can see exactly that but this would print and if you were desperate it would get you out of the bind in Cura we can do exactly the same thing we just W get the warning telling us that the paths overlap I thought we could do better by selecting both parts and then selecting merge but for some reason that moves the cube relative to the Beni and the two models still overlap on the inside but back in prusia slicer or one of its derivatives if we right click on one of the models and now come to add part and then finally load we can select our second model position it where we want and now when we slice we can look inside to see that the two models are finally treated as one this becomes more powerful when we chain them together I've added two cylinders here one as a new piece and another as a subtraction sitting inside the first this has the effect of creating a Beni keyring but of course you can apply this to any models that you want to alter no CAD required it's as if we had modeled it from scratch ourselves and just for completeness sake here's the finished model with the two parts as one here's another simple one that I think a lot of people won't know and that's a G10 bed on a budget I first heard of of G10 as a bed material from Angus of maker Muse and it turns out they can be very effective particularly on filaments like ptg PG bonds so well with Pei sticker sheets that it can rip holes in it and if it doesn't happen catastrophically it might happen slowly over time I found textured PEI to be more durable but it does show wear over time as well and if you're unlucky it's still quite easy to rip holes in it Some people prefer glue stick as a release agent but for me that's way too messy and that's where G10 is so much better this particular bed that I'm showing here is from VPS data it's quite thin and that means it's quite flexible and since it has the magnet already bonded to the back as well as the bamboo lab nozzle cleaning area it makes it very convenient to use using this bed I can print lots of small parts without any real risk of them falling off and ruining the print these are quality beds but they certainly aren't cheap on a bamboo lab machine you'll pay €42 55 for a pusia markv or €75 for a Magneto X and I've just ordered one of these but did you know there's a much cheaper solution available and all you need to do is flip over a single-sided PCB because pcbs are made out of G10 also known as Gite and this is free if you've already got some blank PCB lying around to use this it's very simple we put the copper side down and use Clips or tape to hold it to the bed you can then clean the surface with a spray of isopro alcohol followed by a rubber paper t Tower there's no other prep required this is also best suited to a printer with Al as the bed probably won't be super flat apart from that all I did was set the bed temperature to 80° in my slicer with no other changes the first layer bonded perfectly and this is evidenced by the fact these two small parts were still attached perfectly at the end ideally you'll let the G10 cool down before removing the parts but if you're in a hurry small objects will pull off straight away if you're printing much larger objects you going to damage the bed unless you let it cool down first in my case I removed it and waited for some satisfying sounds this is thicker than a dedicated G10 bed but it should have just enough Flex to remove the part cleanly and when you do you should notice a really nice and smooth shiny surface so if you're having trouble with PG or something else and you've got some PCB lying around give this a try before you spend any money on a dedicated bed let's crank the Jank with two more that aren't so obvious this one is quite literally coloring in support and if you're expecting me to now talk about paint on supports in the slicer you're wrong because that's a clever feature not a dodgy one as I said I am quite literally talking about coloring in support so let me explain previously I made a video guide to using support material and in it I showed with a test model some of the most important settings to stop them fusing together permanently we typically leave a very small air gap between the model and support structure but this Gap is something that needs to be tuned and it is a compromise if you get the Gap too small you might find that your support material is very hard to remove you might need specialist tools if you can even get it off if you can however this should leave a very flat surface that was being supported alternatively we can have a large air gap which makes the support very easy to pull off but tends to give us loose extrusions on the underside perhaps the best way to get around this is to print with two different materials for instance PLA and ptg don't like sticking together or you could use a dedicated soluble support like PVA but that of course requires a printer with multi- Extrusion capabilities but what I learned a few years ago when making this Sharpie based tool changer video is that permanent marker absolutely kills inter laser adhesion but we can harness it for our advantage in our slicer we need to come to custom G-Code and scroll down until we hit pause I'm using Clipper for this printer so I'm going to replace m601 with the pause macro I'm also going to have support turned on with the top and bottom distances set right down and the horizontal distance increased between the object and the support now we need to go through the G-Code preview and find the first layer where the part of the model that has the overhang is printed over the top of the support I'm then going to click the plus and add a pause which we can see happens at the beginning of that layer you'll need to click slice one more time before you send the job to the printer we can also do this in Cura and we need to note the layer number where the supported section starts we'll then add a post-processing script for pause at height entering that layer number and altering the rest of the settings as desired I found the pause in the right place in the G-Code but there was other things added in that I would need to delete before printing when the printer gets to the right layer it should pause and wait for you now the coloring in of the support material can commence and the reason we increase the horizontal gap between the support and the model is so we don't accidentally get some Sharpie on it the first time I did this I made the mistake of covering the whole lot in Sharpie and this did too good a job as the next layer wouldn't stick at all so the next time round I purposely left some little segments uncolored on the far right hand side I also purged the filament to keep the nozzle primed although not every perimeter went down perfectly by the time we got to the infill we had a pretty good anchor to attach the straight extrusions and when the print was done just flexing the plate was enough to separate the support material apart from that little segment down the end that I purposely left uncolored but that was still easy enough to remove results for this were pretty encouraging and I think I could get them even better by reducing the distance from 0.1 to zero so it was printing directly on top and finally joining spools of filament the jenway sometimes you really want to join lengths of filament together maybe it's to use up these small leftover sections or perhaps you've got a mega print that you want to run uninterrupted with more than 1 kg of of plastic yes you could simply use the filament runout sensor but that's not always convenient recently I covered some products from Tilman designs including this P welder and Mr Winder you insert two spools of filament from either side it melts them together in the middle and then conveniently winds everything onto a single roll this works remarkably well but we need a juny away with this method we're going to use some spare PTF tube the smaller the internal diameter the better the other tool that you'll need is a heat gun but this took me a few goes to crack so let me skip right to the method that works you want to use a really short length of tube and you want to cut both lengths at a similar angle so they'll meet nicely in the middle after that use your heat gun attacking from every angle and being careful not to apply heat to the exposed filament ends after something like 20 seconds then take the ends of the filament and squish them together into the middle to make them merge you can then support the tube and push the filament joint out until it's clear this join was very strong but also very thick coming in around 2.2 mm predictably it jammed in the extruder and then the print failed so the real secret is to use this much smaller PTF tube which I've Linked In the description this also has the benefit of being translucent and that means you can see the second that the filament melts inside it also makes it easier to see the join when you push the two halves together despite the smaller tube size it's still quite easy to free the filament from inside and push the joint out and now our join is only a little bit bigger than standard typically just under 1.9 mm and that means I could feed one end into the machine start the print wait for the color transition to go through the extruder and then have a silly grin on my face as I watch the new color come successfully out the nozzle I'm going to call this one a huge success honestly this joining method worked way better than I expected there's two main downsides the first being that you need to pull that piece of tube the whole way to the end of the spool and if you're using a full spool that is going to take a while and the second being that you don't want the PTF tube to get too hot because if it does it will release some nasty gas particularly if you have pet birds that's the end of my list but in case it wasn't dodgy enough making this video I discovered this a spider living on my rat rig and I'm going to leave it there make sure to let me know in the comments which of these you've already tried or maybe something outrageous that I've left off my list thank you so much for watching and until next time happy janky but effective 3D printing good 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: 87,160

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d print, 3d printed, 3d printer, short cut, shortcut, tip, tips, jank, janky, dodgy, join filament, g10, garolite, stringing, retraction, filament, tylman designs, pet welder, mr winder, flame, support, sharpie, easy

Id: dCDGhsRTCNU

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024