3D PRINTING

Spending a little time perfecting your printer setup is almost as important as the model creation process itself. Ali Jennings is here to help.

OUR EXPERT

Alastair Jennings happily shares his home with 3D printers hanging from the rafters and spare parts strewn across the filamentlittered floor.

Fine-tuning your printer setup is by far the most important thing you can do when you buy a new model. Don’t just settle for the fact that it works directly out of the box, bar a little assembly. You must check that the base is level, the belts tightened, and everything is bolted in good and tight.

After careful setup you’d hope that the 3D print process would always be simple and carefree. If only this were the case! A 3D printer has many moving parts and so you should expect to carry out a little maintenance along the way. Usually, this is as simple as dabbing a little oil on the axis, a slight tightening of a belt and, on occasion, replacing a bearing or nozzle. Hopefully, by the time you have to replace a component on your 3D printer, you’ll be an expert and making major repairs will be a breeze – or more likely, you’ll use it as an excuse to buy the latest and greatest model!

An accurate 3D printer setup will result in greatquality prints. But taking the long view, it’ll also ensure that your printer will experience minimal strain and wear and so hopefully you and your printer will have a long and happy life together.

While we focused on the mechanics of the printer in last month’s tutorial, this issue we’ll cover several other aspects of 3D printing. First we’ll look at the filament that you use, before moving on to the quality of your machine’s prints, and finally, analysing the 3D models that you choose to print.

Your default printer settings may be good, but run through a few test models to determine which quality setting produces the best results.

Not all printers are made equal, but you can give even the cheapest printer a fighting chance by knowing its strengths and weaknesses.

Let’s start with the materials for Fused Filament Fabrication printers or FFF for short, which is what we’re focusing on in this issue’s article. FFF 3D printers use material supplied on filament reels that are then fed into the machine. As you’ll have noticed, there are plenty of material options out there, and while branded and non-branded PLA, ABS and PETG might all look the same, they’re not. The more you spend on the filament, the better quality it tends to be, but there’s more to it than just the initial quality of the filament.