3D Printing - Step Four - The Future

Before I launch into an argument with myself and a larger community, first an apology on the length of this article, get your cup of cocoa ready. Right, Lets prepare an analogy - The printing of the written word.

In the beginning, possibly just after the earth cooled and the dinosaurs came, man daubed walls with mud and stuff. A very crude story telling tactic but some still survives today. Once words and ideas were formed, we invented tools and moved to stone and chisel, ink and paper etc. Mass printing came along with the printing press but it's use was limited to a few. The break through for individuals to write lots came with the manual and then electric typewriter... well, you could argue the secretary came first, but that's just nit picking.

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 Two - The Model

The printer is now ready, what's next?

Part of my brief was to produce a spider like character called Stealth with 4 legs and wearing a baseball cap. I was given a simple model example and I started from scratch in Blender, I gave myself a 2 hour window to produce a prototype.

So you could just launch into knocking up a character and hope that it prints out... for example, you write a letter in Word and don't really care what printer it comes out on, they all produce the about the same stuff right? Well, that's fine for inkjets and laser printers, but it couldn't be further from the case for 3D printing.

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: