"I wish I knew" Tips When Starting to 3d Print

[pinoyfiasco]

Calibrate. Speaking mostly to FDM printers here, but the principles are universal.

Molten (well, not technically molten) plastic is going to do what it's going to do. Once it leaves your nozzle, physics (particularly thermodynamics) and chemistry take over and it's out of your hands. However, there's plenty you can do before that point to drastically and consistently give your printer a fighting chance, and calibrating/tuning your machine is one of them.

Not only does proper calibration increase your chances of successful, accurate, and clean prints, they also keep you safe and help mitigate the fire risk that comes with having exposed heating elements.

Here are a couple of resources that have been helpful to me:

• TeachingTech
• Ellis3DP

I know that now we have more full-featured, hyper-fast printers that come with multi-material systems and automated bells and whistles (they're even competitively priced), but if you're like me and you're still running on the "older" models where automatic bed tramming was a new thing (my first printer, the Ender 3V2, didn't even have that out of the box), proper maintenance and calibration will keep your dysfunctional desk droids performing well. No, it won't be winning any races against the X1C, but you'll have a reliable workhorse.

 

[Berzzi]

Oh man, where do I even start? There's so many little details I've learned over the course of using my printer, but I'll stick to the big ones that I use for all my prints.

• First things first: take the time to think about where you're going to put the printer and other accommodations it's going to need before you actually buy it. Companies often list the printer's dimensions on their websites; use them to measure out how much space it's going to take up. Also take ventilation and ambient temperature into account when deciding as well!
• Pay attention to whether the printer takes 1.75mm or 2.85mm filament. One will fit in the printer's extruder and is able to be used; the other is worthless without extreme modification.
  • Addendum: printers often ship with their own brand of filament. I highly recommend getting branded filament (eSun, MatterHackers, Inland, etc.) and printing with that instead since the shipped filament is often of low quality.
• If you've scaled your armor to your body but they don't fit on your printer, use Meshmixer's "plane cut" tool to slice up the parts into smaller pieces. Leads to more post-processing time, but you'll be able to print them in the first place.
• Some files you could come across might register as having extra or missing faces in the model (this can also happen while using Meshmixer). As a quick fix, opening the .obj or .stl file in 3D Builder automatically detects these issues and offers a mighty convenient "click me to fix" button. This should take care of the issue, but inspect the Preview tab in your slicer to check for any more issues.
• Be aware of the two types of supports (normal and tree) and which one best suits the part you're trying to print. A chestplate piece I'm currently printing takes 2 days with normal supports. Using tree supports on the same piece adds an extra 15 hours. If you're slicing using Cura, use the Preview tab to see what the print's going to look like and decide for yourself.

I could really go on and on, but I feel that these will be extremely helpful for those of you who are just starting out. Good luck and happy printing!

Meshmixer also has a feature for fixing missing faces and errors, granted it's not good for big errors, but you go into the analysis tab and click inspector. If there's any errors it'll project a lil ball with a line to the error and you can either click auto fix all, or click the ball itself and it'll try to fix it for you

 

[WuFiL]

anyone with expiriance printing nylon and carbon?

 

[MicaHusky]

anyone with expiriance printing nylon and carbon?

I do! I used to work for Fusion3, a company that makes Industrial-grade filament-using (FDM/FFF) machines. (like, 14"x14"x12" fully enclosed heated chamber behemoths). I have a TON of experience with nearly every 3d printable material you can ever imagine, so I feel at least (somewhat?) qualified to answer what I know about Nylon and CF.

For nylon, the name of the game is KEEPING IT DRY. Whenever you're not printing the stuff, it *needs* to be in an active dehumidifier box / filament dryer. I've seen rolls become borderline unprintable within less than a week of being left out. With most nylons, you also have to worry about warping if you have a machine that can't print ABS/ASA, as it has the same tendency to warp off the bed if the machine isn't enclosed and such. one last thing about nylon is yes, it is STRONG AS HECK, however, it's not very good at supporting a cantilevered load for an extended period. Nylon exhibits something called "cold creep", where a force/weight applied to it over a long period of time will cause it to permanently deform in that direction; for example, a wall-mounted rack for something that's printed in nylon would eventually have the prongs bend down over time and they'll stay that way.

Carbon fiber is a weird one. First thing I want to point out is if you are planning on doing anything related to your armor with carbon fiber that you are going to be TOUCHING or WEARING (weapons, armor pieces, helmet, etc) ABSOLUTELY DO NOT. I'd like to recount a conversation I had when I was in customer support for that printer manufacturer: We had a guy print a stick-shift knob for his car (i think it was a BMW or Mercedes or something like, kinda luxury) and he emailed us wondering why his car all of a sudden felt *itchy*. turns out, the knob was letting go of tiny strands of carbon fiber into the car from his hands. he had to have that car detailed by a professional shop to make it stop. You may see people talk about that video that made the rounds a while back about carbon fiber filament letting go of these little strands and being a health risk. I'm not sure how much of an actual "health risk" it *actually* is, but I for one would NEVER EVER EVER want BMW-dude's experience to happen to me from *the armor i'm wearing*....

As far as carbon fiber; material properties wise, a thing I want to mention here is that when people see "carbon fiber", they picture things like airplanes/racecars/etc. Things that are light and STRONG. Here's the thing; that absolutely Is the case when you have a SHEET of WOVEN carbon fiber impregnated with resin like you have in those applications. However, in filament based 3d printing what you have is "chopped" or "powdered" carbon fiber that was added to a base material (nylon, PLA, ABS, whatever) when it was made (they literally mix it in with the raw PLA/etc pellets in the hopper in the filament extrusion machine). This chopped/powdered carbon fiber does two things. it increases STIFFNESS (the resistance to flexing under a given load) but it does so while DECREASING it's overall STRENGTH (the force it takes to snap a part). Basically, you end up with a part that's stiffer but more brittle. the ONLY exception to this is MarkForged and their (patented to the moon and back) "continuous carbon fiber" ONYX platform. it actually feeds a continuous strand of carbon fiber from a separate spool into the nozzle along with their base material, which makes a continuous strand like the items I mentioned before. Don't expect continuous strand carbon fiber for a while to appear in hobbyist machines, their patent doesn't expire for a while.

TLDR: nylon is awesome but will flex under load and stay that way but it's super strong. Carbon Fiber will make your suit itchy and isn't "stronger"; it's stiffer BUT brittle-er than the base material it's added to.