3D Printing - Step Three - The Lessons Learnt

You've unpacked your printer, slapped a few prints through and you now want to tweak a few things to get better or more tricky prints out, so, what's first? This post outlines some of the lessons I learnt along my journey that I didn't find out anywhere on the net. More specifically the bits behind why settings are set the way they are, and what you are aiming at.

Bed leveling

One of the first things that happens when you switch your new printer on is that the bed needs 'leveling'. But this is more than just leveling, you're also setting the gap between the nozzle and the bed as well and if you do this wrong you're in a whole world of pain. A few printers now and more coming soon will do a self level and this takes out the guesswork, but if you have a current model with manual setup you're in for a journey. No one really seems to outline what you're aiming for. From hours of fiddling I think the general idea is to get the bed level for the most part, but the bed as close to the nozzle as possible without actually touching it.

3D Printing - Step One - The Printer

This is the first in a series of posts relating to my experience of getting into 3D Printing.

A long story short, I was roped into helping out a friend of mine with a 3D printing issue. I had a budget and a clear goal so armed with a pretty technical brain - on to the research.

The first printer I came across was the Makerbot series. I knew someone with a Replicator 2 so I went and had a play. I was quite surprised as how well my test print came out. Unfortunately I don't have a photo, but a few tweaks and a few things were already clear: