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3D Printing - A Complete Course with Austen Hartley

teacher avatar Austen Hartley, Entrepreneur | Engineer

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:52

    • 2.

      About Me

      3:08

    • 3.

      Class Project

      1:19

    • 4.

      Types of 3D Printing

      6:05

    • 5.

      Recommended Gear

      9:42

    • 6.

      Pre Flight Printer Check !

      2:09

    • 7.

      Where to get files

      3:24

    • 8.

      Basic Materials Pt 1

      6:04

    • 9.

      Basic Materials Pt 2

      6:39

    • 10.

      Prusa Slicer Pt 1

      15:50

    • 11.

      Prusa Slicer Pt 2

      13:36

    • 12.

      Support Settings Explained

      11:06

    • 13.

      Bed Levelling

      5:25

    • 14.

      TPU Printing

      14:16

    • 15.

      Setting for Fast Printing Pt1

      6:13

    • 16.

      Setting for Fast Printing Pt2

      5:44

    • 17.

      Machine Maintenance

      3:01

    • 18.

      Are Expensive Machines Worth the Cost ?

      5:51

    • 19.

      Fire Safety

      5:45

    • 20.

      Food Safety

      5:51

    • 21.

      Sell your 3d prints

      3:35

    • 22.

      Final Thoughts

      2:01

    • 23.

      Conclusion

      1:14

    • 24.

      Case Study 1

      2:26

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About This Class

Welcome to this Complete Course on 3D Printing !

This course covers everything you need to know from absolute beginner to expert ! My name is Austen Hartley, I'm a Mechanical Engineer and I've dedicated my entire career to 3D Printing and design. 

In this course I will be teaching you everything from opening and calibrating your first 3D printer all the way to designing and optimizing files. In this course, I even discuss production 3D printing incase you're interested in making a career out of it too !

My Gear List 

Click Here !

Meet Your Teacher

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Austen Hartley

Entrepreneur | Engineer

Teacher

I'm a Canadian Entrepreneur. After graduating from Engineering School at the University of Calgary, I had to make the decision between a corporate or entrepreneurial career. I choose to be an Entrepreneur and have never looked back. Currently Building out Fusion 360 For 3D Printing ! 

Get in touch with me here - austen@crate3d.com
Check out my website for more information - austenhartley.com

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hey guys and welcome to this course. My name is Austin. I'm a mechanical engineer and one day for fun, I got a $200 3D printer from Amazon. After printing a few things for myself, I quickly had a ton of people asking me if I could print stuff for them. So I eventually started charging for it. And before I knew it, I had more than 20 3D printers that ran 247 in my basement. Now, that setup quickly became what's called Create 3D.com, which is my company now, we've designed, printed, and shipped literally tens of thousands of parts. I absolutely loved 3D printing and I have personally tried, failed, tested, and most importantly perfected literally everything there is to do with 3D printing. I have to stop the intro for just a second and show you a project that we just finish this right here is the BB8 robot from Star Wars. I designed this and then 3D printed it. You can see it fits on top of one of those robot vacuums here. Just wanted to show you guys an example of an awesome project that was completely designed and 3D printed if you want to see how it works. This is only does, it's kind of silly, but it gives you a good example of some of the things that we can do with 3D printing if you have a good imagination. So back to the intro. Now, this course will cover everything that you need to know from absolute beginner all the way to becoming an absolute expert, whether you're just unboxing your first 3D printer right now or maybe U2 are a graduated engineer with some 3D printing experience. This course is for you. When you finish this course, you'll be able to print anything. And most importantly, you'll have a full understanding of all of the processes involved. So you'll be either ready to push the limits of your hobbyist printing or maybe if you're interested in doing commercial work like Aidid, that something that you will be prepared for at the end of this course. So wait no further. Let's get started right now. I'll see you guys in the course. 2. About Me: Hey guys and welcome to this quick introduction. Now this video here is just for me to properly introduce myself to you. I think this is really important because you're about to invest a couple hours of your time watching and learning from this course with a mass availability of information these days, learning from a reliable and a good source is extremely important. So, who am I and how did you end up on this course? Well, my name is Austin hardly. I'm a mechanical engineer and I graduated from the University of Calgary right here in Calgary, Canada. Basically right after I graduated, I decided to start my own company and do engineering design and 3D printing. Now, while I was in school, near the end of school, actually had everything set up so that upon graduating, I basically just hit the ground running with this company. Basically what happened was in engineering school, we took a CAD design course. Cad stands for computer aided design, which is essentially a program called SolidWorks. That's the one that we learned on, and it's just a fancy engineering design software. After that course, I pretty much knew exactly what I wanted to do. I was well equipped with the tools to take an idea and turn that into a physical object via 3D printing. And pretty much after I got my first printer, I did a couple of designs and prints. I knew this would be my career. I purchased a couple of ender three 3D printers. I started posting my design services available online before I knew it there was so much work that I couldn't keep up and I actually opened an office just down the street. They're on seventh, seventh downtown Calgary. And essentially what we did is a ton of design and printing for the last couple of years, a little more about what we do. Basically, there's three types of work that we do. Number one is if someone just sends us a file to print, we simply print it. Number two is if someone needs something design and then print it, we also do that. Then finally number three, we have a digital sculpting design part of the company where basically we designed those fancy 3D objects that you might see in things like a video game or VR or AR, or something like that. So why is this important and why is this a video important? Because basically the first year and a half, I was all on my own doing this company. I tried every type of filaments system design software, you name it. I had to be efficient because frankly we had no money. I was just coming out of university. I literally started with a $200 end or three 3D printer. Now fast forward to today and I am the CEO of the company and I oversee all the incoming projects as well as the deliverables. So basically deciding what projects we want to take on and then confirming the designs, the prints, and the settings before we go into hand things over to the clients. If you can think of it honestly, we probably designed it and in this course It's now my turn to equip you with the knowledge and the skills so that you can be ready to print anything that you can think of. I hope that helps. I will provide more information later on in the course and tons of examples of what we do in case you're interested in checking out my company or the type of work that we do as you might be doing some of the same work. So let's leave it at that and honestly, let's just jump into the course. I'm excited, I'm excited for you guys to learn and take your ideas and turn them into real 3D prints and real objects. So let's jump in. 3. Class Project: Hey guys and welcome to this lesson. In this lesson we're just talking briefly about the class project now, before you get caught up, don't worry, I know most class projects are extremely boring. I promise this will be one of if not the most fun class projects that you've done. Basically all we're gonna do is it's really simple as you go through the course, I want you to please post photos of your very first prints and also the ones that you complete along the way doing this course. That way we have kind of a before and an after and just a little timeline of those. Me personally, I still have the very first print that I did. It's sitting over there and honestly it is just the sample file that came with the SD card, the printer, and it is probably one of the most sentimental things that I own today as that kind of shaped my career in the last five to ten years of my life. So please, as you go through the course, just do post some photos that way I can see them, I can review them for myself. And it also gives the class things to View and things to engage with. Pretty much check them all. And I'm excited to see how you guys progress all the way from your very first prints at the beginning of the course to the last ones near the end of the course. So that's all I wanted to say with this video is to participate in posting your 3D prints into the class projects. So that's it. I'll see you guys in the next video. 4. Types of 3D Printing: The first thing that we should address is what is 3D printing? Now if you're watching this, chances are you might already know the answer to that. However, this would be a complete course without at least acknowledging and quickly discussing the main two types of 3D printing. So the first type and the main focus of this course is called FDM printing. Now, the FDM stands for Fused Deposition Modeling, which is just a fancy way of saying what we're gonna do is melt plastic layer by layer to create a 3D object. Now, the other common 3D printing method is called SLA or stereolithography. There is a few different names for it, but essentially that is the process of curing a liquid layer by layer to create that same 3D object that gets cured using light. Let me show you two real-life examples of this. Behind me here you can actually see this is a monkey here that we sculpted and printed. It is actually an NFT in 3D form, but it was done using resin printing. Now, this could have been done using FDM printing. However, it has some complex geometry and small parts, so it was easier to resin print it. Now, if we check out something like this BB8 robot, this was done using FDM printing. And again, this could have been done using resin printing, but because of the geometry, it was so much easier to complete this task with FDM printing. Now this course will focus pretty much only on FDM printing. Honestly, 99% of what I do is done with FDM printing. Most of the engineering work that my company does is with FDM printing. Most of the client work that we do is for FDM printing. And me personally, the hobby work that I do just for myself for fun is done with FDM printing. Essentially, the only time that you really need an SLA printer or a resin printer is war very small and intricate models where the geometry of those models is complex. Like maybe the little points that you can see on this model here. By the way, if you're brand new to 3D printing, all of this is a little bit confusing or you feel like we're already just kind of diving off the deep end. Don't worry at all. Just keep watching because I will be explaining everything in greater detail. This is just an introduction to the two different types of printing. So let me actually, let me put this year for a minute and let me show you three more examples of things that we would FDM print and then three examples of things that we had resin print. Let's start with the BBA, like I said, starting with FDM, as I mentioned this year, is that robot I showed you this in the introduction. So why did we FDM parenthesis versus resin print it? And the reason for that is basically because of the size. This is a pretty large 3D print. To print this in resin would require a really big resin printer where resident printers are typically, are, they typically have smaller build volumes then do FDM printers. So part number two, let me grab this right here. This is a tire protector and it was printed from a flexible material, which is the reason that we went with FDM printing. That is because there is a greater material selection. We can print things like flexibles, carbon-fiber composites, dissolvable, etc. All of those we will also be describing in greater detail. Number three, this year is an electric skateboard or a one we'll stand. Maybe you're familiar with it and maybe you're not. It is very, very strong. The board weighs about 30 pounds and when it sits in here, this does not even flex or move. This thing is solid as a rock. And the reason that we FDM printer this is a because it was really cheap to do. This whole thing here is maybe only a dollar or two in filament. And also it's extremely strong, which is what we needed for it to hold the actual skateboard in there. Now for resident, like I mentioned this year is the 3D printed NFT. Hopefully you can see that I'll put some close-ups in there as well. But the question I want to answer here is, why do we print this in resin instead of FDM printing? And the reason is because I wanted it printed with as high of detail as possible. Now, most FDM printers, like the one you can see behind me there have a nozzle diameter of 0.4 millimeters, which means that the resolution of those prints are slightly more limited. Whereas with resin printing, you can almost not even see the different layer lines on the actual prints now, resin print number two, I don't have one of these with me, so I will just put them on the screen. That is the mold for a ring. Jewelers like people who make jewelry, absolutely loved resin printing for small complex geometry. Things like pendants, rings, necklaces, charms, all that kind of stuff. What those have in common is that they are small and highly detailed. People who use resin printing, use it to print stuff like that. Finally, resin print number three. This is just a miniature figurine here. Again, you can see the level of detail. It's small and this is printed, it's only about 30 millimeters tall. What I want to say about this one is that this figure is going to be painted, which brings up another thing when you are resin printing, you can actually only print in one single color. Whereas with FDM printing, you can actually print in multiple colors at the same time. That there is another difference. Let's put this guy back on all guys, I love FDM printing my company and I, we really don't do a lot of resin printing, almost none to be honest. In general, most functional parts are FDM printed. When should you get a resin printer? I would say if you have one specific item in mind that you plan on printing and only printing that one type of item like different pieces of jewelry, for example, then resin might make more sense. Now, when I look around the studio here and I see a bunch of different objects, like I see the light stand and the tripod and the wall stand there. All of these things would be FDM printed. I highly, highly recommend starting out with FDM printing. And if you really want to add a resin printer to your setup later than that is pretty easy to do as a lot of the skills that we're going to learn here will actually crossover into resin printing as well. So that's it for this episode here or this video. Hopefully that clarifies the two different types of printers that you might be looking at if you are just getting started, if you're just looking into printing and you're wondering what these different machines are. Hopefully that clarifies it up a little bit. Like I said, I do recommend starting with FDM and discourse here we'll go over all of FDM printing an FDM printing techniques. So I'll see you guys in the next video. 5. Recommended Gear: In this lesson, we're talking about gear. Personally, I'm a bit of a Girsanov. I love gear, I love printers, I love hardware, I love tools. Do you name it? That's why I became a mechanical engineer. So let's jump in and let's talk about the gear list. You'll find the gear list linked in the project files of this course. So I'm just gonna go through them one-by-one and talk about it. Now, every piece of gear that you see on that list, we personally have between 1200 those items sitting in the shop at all times. So I literally use them every day and I'm testing hundreds and hundreds of different products over the last five or six years and that is the final gear list that we have. So let's talk about it. Now, starting with our printers is probably the most fun part, but let's talk about it. So personally, I've owned and use $200 printers as well as printers up to $50 thousand. And here is the conclusion because I think it's quite interesting for the vast majority of people, I would say 99.9% of people, a basic FDM printer is more than enough. Now interestingly, my company is actually included in that 99.9%. A long time ago, I made a poor decision and bought a very expensive printer, thinking that it would open the doors to all kinds of opportunities because it could print in these specialty materials. Now it turns out that for the one job a month that it actually brought in the US that specialty material and we needed that expensive for it was actually just a lot cheaper to get someone else to print it rather than actually owning that giant expensive printer. So that being said, the budget printer at the top there is the ender three, the base model and are three, it has been the best and the most affordable printer for the last eight issue years, maybe even more. And it's actually the first printer that I ever had at 1 in time. I actually had about 20 of them running 247 in my basin and that's how I started my business hands down. It's a great option. I think it's the best option out there if you're just getting into 3D printing and don't have a big budget now, it also shifts as a kit if you do have to build it and kind of assemble the pieces together. Some people don't like that, but honestly, it teaches you how the machine actually works and aware all of the pieces and parts go. So moving on next up is the best overall printer k, That is the one that you see behind me right here. Prusa machines cannot be beat if you have the budget and you're serious about 3D printing and you're getting it into it as either a serious hobby or maybe even you're thinking about doing a little bit of commercial work, I highly recommend jumping in order a Prusa. The difference between the Prusa and the ender three, basically, the Prusa will require less maintenance and less tinkering. Eventually, our business, we upgraded all of our industries to prove some machines. It's essentially just the next level for convenience, reliability and precision, recommend just order direct from Prusa to get the best deal and others tons of resellers. But if you order a direct from Prusa, you tend to get the best deal. There is also the option on the Prusa website, you can buy either the kit or one that's fully assembled. Now the kit teaches you how the printer works when you assemble it. But I will note that the Prusa Kit does take a long time to build, whereas the end or kit, it's kind of already put together a little bit fun fact, when my business was just starting out, I used to purchase the Prusa kits. I would build them and then I would sell them as built kits. I have personally assembled between at least 5000 of those machines right behind me there. So me I honestly never want to see those again because I do know how to assemble it without even the instruction manual, but nonetheless, you have to start somewhere and that's where I started. So the last point there on that list, there is the best large volume printer. Now, this is the best printer if you want to print bigger pieces. This is the CR ten series. It's by far in my opinion, the best option, especially if you want to print big pieces like cosplay helmets are honestly really any other large prints that you're interested in doing. It's essentially a upgraded ender three that is also bigger. So yes, that is by far, by far my first and number one recommendation for a larger 3D printer. Now also on that list below is my recommended resin printer options. If you're interested in also learning resin or purchasing a resin printer at the same time, you can go ahead and get one of those. I actually have two of the recommended resin printers sitting right there. And if I'm being honest, they hardly get used because we personally don't do a lot of resin printing, but that is the option and that's why I recommend if you're interested in getting resin printers, realistically, you can't order both an FDM and a resin printer for quite cheap these days. So it is really cool to see that the technology has become affordable and accessible to almost anyone now. For the accessories, any upgrades, okay, if you get the basic ender three, I highly highly recommend getting both the glass bed as well as the PTFE tube upgrade. Those are linked, you'll see them in the sheet there. If you get the Prusa, there is no need, but no matter what printer you get, you should get an adhesive. We personally apply adhesive to the print bed before every single print. I essentially look at it as an insurance policy that your print won't fall off the print bed while it's printing. If you don't want to get the adhesive, you can also just use a glue stick, put that on the print bed before you start printing. It's not the best, but it does work now, the bed leveling kit that's in there again. Just for the under three, it's essentially a probe that helps level the bed. That one is totally optional. I actually don't recommend purchasing it at the very beginning, but after a couple of weeks, if you find it really annoying to level and mess with the level of your print bed. You might want to try that one out, which is why I put it on there. So the next one is a dehydrated. The dehydrated is really important if this one does depend where you live. If you live somewhere with high humidity and high moisture in the air, I highly, highly recommend you get a dehydrated. Our shop here and where I am right now is in Canada, it's like minus 20 out and snowing right now. So there's very little moisture in the air and we don't really need to use them unless we're printing in nylon or something like that. But in general, the companies that we work with all over the world, if it is human where they are doing work and where they're doing printing, they all use dehydrated, believe it or not, but your filament actually absorbs moisture from the air and it can directly affect the quality of your print. Lastly, on that little list of accessories is a screw set. Basically if you're downloading files online and depending what your download, if you download something that's an assembly that needs to fit together, then you need to attach those pieces together and it's likely that you can use these or that those pieces were designed to be used with this screw. Say here it's basically just the most common fasteners that are used in the 3D printing world. So if you download something from Thingiverse and you go, you print all the pieces you go to build it. Likely you can use those fasteners. Next section we have up is remote monitoring. If you want to connect your printer to your computer and your systems and monitor it remotely and control it remotely. You need a Raspberry Pi as well as a camera. This enables you to basically send files wirelessly instead of using an SD card. And you can also just keep an eye on your printer and pretty much control it without actually having to touch the printer itself. I highly recommend this. It's super convenient. And also when you're outside or maybe if you're not home to watch your printer, you can keep an eye on it. You can also start prints remotely, which is a great feature to save you time. Next up is filament. This section is pretty easy. These are just the links to the ones that we use. Now, trust me, when I say We'd probably tried and use every single brand of filament over the last couple of years. And this is simply just the most reliable ones that we found. Let's keep going. Next up on that list is actually one of my favorites. Probably, maybe even my favorite right now because we recently discovered this. This is a super glue plus an activator, I get a ton of questions about how do we print an assembled big objects. The easiest way to do it is to split it into smaller pieces and then connect those pieces. And the best way to connect them, or at least one of the best ways is with the superglue that I attach there or the fasteners that I linked above. However, the superglue is your super convenient. I highly, highly recommend that as your go-to solution, given that those parts that you're building are not bearing a lot of weight or taking a lot of force than the superglue is perfect. For example, that BB8 robot, I haven't right here. Every single piece on here, there's about ten or 20 different pieces. And all of these were actually super glued together. Next time we have air filtration. My opinion on this one is slightly different than the opinion of most people personally. I think it's worth setting up air filtration no matter what. There's a lot of people that say you only need air filtration if you are printing in a toxic material like ABS or ASA For example. In my opinion, I think it's better be safe than sorry and simply set up an exhaust system near your printer that is basically pulling in the air or other little plastic particles that are in the air out and it is maybe extracting them outside. A simple system like that. I think it's worth doing now, if you are just putting in PLA and PET g, you technically don't need to do this, but like I said, I highly, highly recommend doing an interest, keeps him clean, it keeps the air clean, especially if you're printing in places that you live. If you have a little office at your house or something like that, it's best to just keep that space ventilated, that there is the gear list from years of experience, that's what we use everyday and what we recommend. I will continuously update this list as we go. It doesn't change very often, but if it does, I will update it. You will always have access to that list. So I hope that's a ton of help if you're just getting started out or if you're in the market for a new printer, let's keep going on with the course and I'll see you guys in the next video. 6. Pre Flight Printer Check !: Hey guys and welcome to this quick lesson on this one here is what I call a preflight check. Basically, if you just got your new printer or even if you've already been using it for a long time. These are the three things that I recommend checking before every single prints or at least checking once every couple of prints just to ensure maximum safety as well as maximum quality that you're getting out of your machine. Now, I've already recorded this lesson a little while back, so I'm going to play that now. This one's quick and then I'll see you guys in the next lesson. So after you build your printer, it's critical that we go through these three things in order to ensure the maximum print quality, as well as make sure that we're getting the least wear and tear on your machine as it operates. Number one is belt tension. We need to check the X, Y, and Z belt of your printer. We want them type a, we don't want them too tight or it will wear out your machine a lot faster than under normal conditions. A good test of this is to actually just try and pinch the belts together. There should be some resistance, but you should be able to touch them together. If you struct about like it was a guitar string, it should basically just vibrate for a second. Next up is the wires. This one is also really important because we don't want to fire. That's super simple. Just make sure to move your x, y, and your z axis. Makes sure that none of the cables have even the slightest potential of getting caught on anything. This is extremely important and should be done before every single print. However, please do note that this should only be done when the machine is powered on. You don't want to be moving around the axis of your machine when it's powered off. Because if you do that, basically what you're doing is you're actually sending power back through the machine and the machine electronics, and that is not good board, so let's just not do that. Third, let's make sure that our nozzle is tight. Okay. If the nozzle is not tight, basically what happens is it melted plastic can ooze out from the top of the nozzle. It will fall, it will land on your prints and then the printer head will actually knock into it and basically your print will just fall off the bed. It's a common cause of printf failure. So make sure that your nozzle is tight. 7. Where to get files: Hey guys and welcome to this lesson. This one should be rather quick, but it is exciting in this lesson, we're talking about where you can get a free and paid files for your 3D printing needs. So let's just jump into it now. We probably know by now that we are looking for a dot STL files. And there's really three or four main sources that people get their files for. Number one, free files, thingiverse.com is by far the most popular. Let's just run through an example here so that I can show you how to find good files on Thingiverse, then import them into your slicing software, and then using the other lessons that you've seen so far, you can go ahead and slice and then print all of those objects. Let's do that right now. Here we are on Thingiverse.com and let me just show you a little bit about how this website works and how to find reliable file. So let's say for example, we wanted a, you can honestly, you can really search anything. I'm gonna search phone holder, something very basic. Let's see what comes up. So you'll notice we have all of these different options. You can see the little heart thing here. This is how many people actually liked the file. So in a way, it kind of sorts it by trust in popularity and things like that. So the files that have lots of the likes on them are generally pretty good files to print. So for example, let's say that I wanted to print this file here, it says Kitty phone holder. Let's check this one out. What happens is it brings up here you can see the pictures of it. And then also what you get is this sort of 3D file right here in the top right-hand corner. We can actually open a 3D view of this file so that we can see exactly what we are downloading and then what we're gonna be printing. Let's say that we liked this file. We simply go up to the top right-hand corner right here we press download files and it'll bring you down here you see it says thing files. And then we can go ahead and press Download. Now, while this downloads for a second, Let's talk quickly. This is the licenses that either already talked about in the course or I will be talking about it soon. So do pay a little bit of attention to that in case you're thinking about selling your 3D prints. Let's exit out of this. Let me point out a couple more things. Comments. It's always good if you're finding a file that doesn't have a lot of likes on it, quickly go check the comments and people will basically comment and say, maybe this file doesn't work or the settings for this file, or there's a hole in this file, something like that. It's just a good way to double-check that the file is indeed a good file to print. Next up we have make, so this is people posting their prints. You can see this is just another validation method. I encourage you to always go through and check just so that you know that the file you're about to print is indeed a good file and compatible because as we know, some of these prints can be up to 30408300 hours. So if you're going to invest that time, you'd better make sure that the file is indeed a good file. Now remixes is just a section that let's say I downloaded this file. There was something I didn't like about it, so I wanted to make a new file. I could go ahead and edit that file and then upload it as a remix. And this would allow other people to download my remixed version. So we have our downloaded file, it's right here called cat stand. I'm gonna scroll this into Prusa Slicer right here. And you can see that now we have r dot STL file downloaded from Thingiverse and that is pretty much it in one of the future lessons or maybe you've already seen it by now. We will go over slicing and all the slicing settings for Prusa slicer so that there is Thingiverse and that's how the universe works. 8. Basic Materials Pt 1: Hey guys and welcome to this lesson. In this lesson it's time that we start talking about the different materials that we can use. Now, how are we gonna go through this as I'm actually going to split the material section of this course up into two parts. The first part being the basic, most common materials and most US, That's what I think the vast majority of people will be using it will be interested in, in part two of the materials, I'm actually going to go over the more complex materials like the dissolvable support, some carbon fiber, all that kind of fancy stuff. So what I did is I've actually already recorded a section that has been available on my YouTube channel about basic materials. I'm gonna play that from the beginning and then we're going to dive into the more complex ones in part two. So here's the basic section. Let's watch this now. And then after that, I'll see you guys in the next one. It's time to talk about some materials. I've been in the industry a very long time. I printed with the vast majority of materials that are available on the market today. And I can tell you that PLA, BET G and abs are by far the most common use and also the most common requested by clients. So let's talk a little bit in depth about all of those. We're gonna start with PLA, but before we actually go in and start talking about PLA, there is a few notes and recommendations that I do want to make with any role of plastic. Basically, a key point is that moisture is the enemy. Okay? If you live somewhere that's humid, you're probably going to want to have a dehydrated or for your filament? Yes, the plastic that is on that role will actually pull moisture out of the air and absorb it. And that can really affect the quality of your print. For example, if you take a role of nylon and you leave it somewhere humid or basically anywhere, when you actually go to print with it, you can literally hear the water and the moisture boiling off as that filament comes out through the nozzle. So therefore, I do recommend a dihydrate are and especially, especially if you live somewhere humid. I'll put a bunch of links in the description of this video for the specifics on that. Now my second recommendation is print bed adhesive. The very first layer of your 3D print is the absolute most important and we need to be sure that it sticks to the print bed sufficiently. Now, personally, I use 3D printer adhesive on every single print that we run. If you check online, if you go to the Facebook groups, there's a lot of people out there bragging Lego first layer, so perfect. No adhesive meeting. No adhesive needed. No one cares. Use print bed adhesive if you want to improve the probability of success on every print. If you think about it, if you're about to run a tend to say 200 our print, the three sensitive cost you in 3D printer, adhesive or even just a glue stick is basically just an insurance policy that that print does not come loose from the print bed and honestly, it's just worth it. So I'll leave it at that you can take my word for it or not. You'll probably learn on your own regardless. Now lastly, what we need to talk about is filament costs. The prices of filament are extremely variable, variable from one store to the next. If you're only ordering a couple of roles here and there, you really can't go wrong just using Amazon, however, if you find yourself ordering a ton of filament, reach out to a local supplier, ask them about a bulk order discount or a coupon code. For example, if you have a store down the road from your house and you're printing all the time, just ask them, Hey, I'm coming here, I'm always going to buy your film. Is there any deal that you can give me? You might save a bunch of money into long-run doing that. Now we can get into the materials. So starting with PLA, PLA stands for polylactic acid. Not that anyone really cares, but we do care about are the properties and use cases of PLA. Pla a typical nozzle temperature somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and thirty degrees and a print bed temperature of around 50 degrees. Now, when you buy a roll of plastic, you will always have the recommended temperatures on the box. Always, always start with those. The reason that PLA is so commonly used is because it does not shrink very much. Therefore, it's pretty easy to start printing with. What happens with some other materials is that the first few layers that you print are so close to the print bed that they are pretty much act print bed temperature. So like for PLA, those first few layers of plastic will be at around 50 degrees. However, as you move up and away from the print bed, you're basically at room temperature. So now what's happening is that the extruder is extruding plastic at the nozzle temperature, which is in really quickly cooled down to room temperature. And that can cause severe shrinking in some plastics. And this is a huge problem for 3D printing. But fortunately, with materials like PLA, we don't have to worry so much about that. With PLA, we have a nozzle temperature of around 200 to 230 degrees Celsius and a print bed temperature of 50 degrees. Let's talk about the pros and cons of PLA. Pros a PLA, as I already mentioned, the low shrinkage upon cooling basically makes it really easy to print. Next up is that it's readily available. You can buy PLA pretty much anywhere in any color. It is probably the most common material. Next is a strength PLA, under standard conditions is actually really strong, like a lot stronger than you probably think you can make totally functional parts with PLA. It is absolutely not just for prototyping, that is a total myth. Now let's talk about some of the cons because there are indeed some serious cons with PLA. The biggest con being temperature. Pla basically gets destroyed by hot temperatures, typically around 55 degrees Celsius or 130 degrees Fahrenheit, PLA gets super weak. So for example, if you had a black PLA print sitting outside in the hot California sun and maybe it was holding up some tools on the wall, something like that. That's a bad idea. Well probably warp and eventually fail over time, it'll basically just melt. So we see this probably most commonly when people print something for cars, they'll print something like a cup holder, the leaving in a car on a hot day. And then basically they come back. 9. Basic Materials Pt 2: A pile of plastic. So basically if you're making a part that is going to be subject to any sort of he simply just don't print it out of PLA. Next con is at PLA is actually pretty expensive relative to other materials. Okay, You'll figure this out when you shop around for different materials. But PLA is pretty often never the cheapest, even though it is the most popular. The next command is with post-processing. You can't sand PLA very well. So for example, if you wanted to print something sand a primate and paint it than PLA, might not be your best option overall. Plas number one, it is fantastic. It's easy to print and that is, it's so popular. Basically, if you're, the part that you're making is going to be subject to heat. Just don't use PLA, which brings us to next up we have PET g. I love PET g, We use it a lot, probably, maybe 40 to 50% of the things that we print our NPV GTG. So what is BEG? Well, I'm not even going to try and pronounce the name, but the best way to think of it as that PET g is a great alternative to PLA when temperature is a factor in the function of your prints. Now yes, That is just a generalization, but when you're just starting out, That's a good way to think of it. If you do some research on PDG, you'll see that things like water bottles, that liquid containers are commonly made from PEG or another derivative of PE T. Basically pat G or PET g does not get soft at that 55 ish degrees Celsius like PLA does. Instead, PET g is good to about 85 degrees, which helps us cover that wide range of applications when we just can't quite use PLA. Unfortunately, though PET g is not quite as easy to print with, it tends to be a little bit more stringy and is sometimes tougher to get perfect layers and overhangs. But let's just jump right into the pros and cons. So PRO number one, like I mentioned, that it's not affected by heat as much as PLA is. That is probably the primary reason why people use PET g programmer to Peggy is really strong. It's actually stronger and more durable than PLA in most cases, PRO number three, Apache is really cheap now, this probably depends where you live a little bit and I assume that don't quote me on this, but I assume it's because in large-scale manufacturing, they probably use so much PET g pallets, they melt them down, they turn them into lots of different things. And we probably use those same palettes for PET g manufacturing for printer filament. That's just my guess. Don't quote me on it, but because of that PET g is often available for pretty cheap. Now the cons, patchy is tough to post-process. There are not a lot of options when it comes to post-processing your prints like PLA, it's not good to sand. You can indeed use some special finishing products on it. But like I said, if you want to just print something, Sanat private paint it, PET g is not the material that you want to use. Likely if you start sanding it, it will actually delaminate Or basically all the layers will separate from one another. The next codon with printing PEG is printing Pat G supports, they typically actually end up fusing to the objects. So printing supports with Peggy is just not a great option and is 100% possible to do, but it is just not ideal. Column number three is that when printing pet GED bed and the nozzle temperature are actually significantly higher than PLA. So uses more electricity be it probably puts some more wear and tear on the machine. However, see honestly, just a failure percentage with patchy prints is a lot higher than it is with, which brings me to probably my favorite material which is abs. Let's talk a little bit about ABS. Abs, although it is not really considered a specialty material, if you are a hobbyist printer, I will consider this a specialty material because as the operator of your machine and as a person who is handling all the materials, you need to be aware of the difference between them. And there are some significant ones for ABS, number one, and this is extremely important is that abs creates toxic fumes, so you cannot release, you should not leave your printer printing abs indoors without proper ventilation. Now, when I say proper ventilation, I don't mean just like crack a window and go ahead and print I mean like an actual duct and a fan that is actually taking up the fumes and exhausting them outside or something like that. If you're curious, I've linked to my setup below in the description. But now it's probably a good time to mention if you are interested in a very in-depth course on 3D printing, I'm in the process of making one. I'll link it in the description when it's ready. However, don't worry, this video here that you're watching right now has absolutely more than enough practical information to get you started and cover all the basics if you are just a hobbyist, the course is more for people who are really looking to take their 3D printing to the next level. Maybe do a commercially or for people who want to learn how to do things like take literally any idea and turn it into something that you can print or for printing really fast or printing really accurate specialty things like that. Now back to ABS, pros and cons. Obviously con number one is those fumes, okay, that is a huge con. It's kind of a pain to actually set up the ventilation system. It's just one more thing that you have to do. But yes, you need to be aware of that. Column number two is the temperature is even higher than PLA and PET g. Now you need a nozzle temperature of between about two hundred and forty and two hundred and sixty degrees as well as in bed temperature of around 100 degrees. Not all printers can even hit the bed to around a 100 degrees. That is just a reference value. You can't get away with less than a 100 degrees, but it is a good reference value. And now column number three. Number three is that if you don't have a heated chamber for your printer or at least an enclosure, what's likely going to happen is that your principle actually shrink so much that they may even crack if they're big 3D prints. A heated chamber is by far the best solution and an enclosure is okay. I know what you're thinking with all of these cons. What could possibly be good about abs? And while there's tons and tons of parts that are manufactured and made out of ABS. Here's why PRO number one is the heat resistance is better than PLA and better than PDG. Using abs are good to around a 100 degrees Celsius for the part actually degrades. Pro number two is finishing methods, okay, You actually can sound abs, so that's great for people who want to make things like props or really anything that you do want to paint. Pro number three is that it's really strong when it is printed right now. It's not even necessarily stronger than PLA, which most people think it is. It's actually not, but it is certainly durable. Pro number four is that it's mass-produced, which means it's usually pretty cheap. Again, basically, I just want to reiterate that with no enclosure and no venting system, it's probably not worth printing abs. Pet g is pretty good. 10. Prusa Slicer Pt 1: Hey guys and welcome to this lesson. This one is important. In this lesson, I'm going to go through the basic settings, improves the slicer so that you can optimize your printing and get the most out of your 3D printer. I'm also going to talk about a few fun things like the fastest and the slowest print settings that I would ever use that way, you can have a reference for if you want to speed up or slow down your prints. Now, this video here, there will be two parts to using Prusa Slicer. The first is this one where I'm gonna cover all the basics and get you guys started. And then near the end of the course, I'm going to throw in an advanced section for using Prusa slicer just for basically those people who really want to tinker and optimize all of their settings. That one is a fun video, but like I said, that one will be later. Now, first thing is first, as the title suggests, we are using Prusa slicer. Now, if you don't have a Prusa machine like the one behind me there, that's totally fine. I'm gonna show you how you can set up Prusa slicer for any printer. Now, you might be wondering why Perusall slicer, why not something like Cura, I think yours is probably the most popular, popular one out there, but here's why Cura is made by Ultimaker. We've used the Ultimaker machines. They're quite expensive and honestly, we just didn't love it, so we ended up switching and try new softwares. We've used Idea Maker simplify 3D Prusa slicer, and there was one more, but anonymously, four out of four of us, a couple of weeks later sat down and we all agree that Prusa slicer was by far the best one. Additionally, Prusa as a company, in my opinion, is the company who is doing the best job innovating in the field of desktop printing. So therefore, for us it feels like a future proof plan to learn their software and become experts with that. That being said on all guys, all slicers are quite similar. And what you could do is if you wanted to use Cura or a different one, you can pretty much just take all the settings that I'm giving you from this video and then plug them into Cura and it would do the exact same thing. But frankly, if you're just starting out, if this is your first time slicing and working with STL files and bringing them in and preparing them for printing then honestly for the first ten to 15 prints anyways, I'm probably just going to recommend that you use the standard profiles that are within any slicer that you're using. So let's jump right into it. I'm going to bring my computer over here. I'm gonna get my screen recording going and we are just going to go through Prusa from start to finish. So on your screen now you should see exactly what I'm looking at. You can see I have Prusa 2.4 loaded on my computer here. Whatever version you have, it doesn't matter, they're not super different from version to version. But if this is your first time opening the software, you're probably gonna see a screen that looks something like this. Let's get started. This is pretty much we're gonna go from start to finish with the basic settings that you need, as well as setting out proofs of slicer. So starting out at the main screen here, you can see that the first thing it asks us to do is to pick the printer that we have. Now for example, the machine behind me, there wouldn't be the MK three right here. We also have a few MK three S plus units. That would be this one. Or if you are using a different printer, like I said, if you don't have a person machine, I'm gonna show you what we would do with that. But if you do have a Brewster machine, go ahead and click them on that you have and press Next. Now this ordinary here is just the Prusa SLA Machines. We're not using that. Like I said, we've already gone over that in the course so far. This right here is the other vendor section. This is where for example, if you had a andere three basic printer that's in the gear list, this is where we would add that in. So let's say that we had an end or three. We will go, we'll click on reality. We will go next, and then we'll click on our end or three, or maybe you even bought the end or three V2. So I know, I don't think they enter three V2 is worth it, but let's go ahead and let's say that we just got the reality end or three, we can go ahead and we can press Next. This part right here, okay? If your printer that you have for some reason is not on this list, and maybe you even built your own printer. This is where you would add that in. So for me, I would go ahead in here and I would say Austin's a 3D printer. Again, it's very likely that the printer you have is on that list, but if it isn't, then you can go ahead and you can add that in here. If you're doing that, then you can go ahead and click next at this list, it's probably a RepRap printer for reference rep rap in case you don't know, that's kind of like a very old and original term with 3D printing rep rap basically means you're, you have a printer that can essentially print itself or parts for itself or really any machine. So for example, the Prusa machines here, they're actually made, the parts for those are actually printed with person machines. So rep rap is kind of what that means. That's just a fun fact again, it doesn't really matter. So moving on again, this is just part of setting up our custom printer. This would be the x and the why Bill Plate. You would know that if you have a printer that's not on that list, nozzle diameter, filament diameter, it'd be 0.4 and very likely to be 1.75. Again, you would know that if you are doing something like building your own printer or if your printer is not on that list, temperature, these we can edit later as well. So I went to even worried about those. Next up here we have filaments. Now under filaments, the only ones that I actually recommend having checked our generic abs, generic PET g, generic PLA, as well as the same counterparts for the person and filaments. So that would be the person in PET g and the person meant PLA, the rest of this stuff we don't really need. If there is a filament there, for example, maybe you always order reality PLA, then you could go ahead and you could check that, but honestly, it doesn't really matter. So I'm gonna go ahead and just uncheck all the ones that I wouldn't use. And this is how I would leave it for myself. So then I go next updates, leave those on this part right here, reload from disk. Let's just go next and then view mode again, don't worry about this because we can change it later, but let's just start with simple. Then go ahead and press Finish, and it will bring you to a screen that looks like this. So welcome to produce a slicer. This right here would be the print bed of your machine, whether that be the reality machine or any machine or even one like the person machine behind me here. Let's talk through the dashboard here of Prusa slice are the main two buttons here on the bottom where we have our 3D editor view as well as our preview. This is actually the Slice button. This is when it's slices are 3D objects. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to import our very first 3D object. This is something from Thingiverse. It's just called a calibration cube. You'll see these all the time and I'll put a link to it so that if you want to use this file, you can as well. So you'll see that right here we have what is called a calibration cube. Now, the thing about our calibration cube, you'll notice that on it it has an x, it has a y, and it has a z. Those correspond to the accesses or the axis of the printer. We can see if we go this way, this is our x with the red arrow right here. Let me zoom in. So x is this one right here going this way, the same way that it's running parallel to the x on the face here. Y is going this way, it's with the green line here. And then z is our vertical that is going up and down in 3D space. So that's our XYZ. And you can see that we have more numbers over here that actually coordinate to the actual x, y, and z. So you can see we have position and rotation, the scale size, or also we have the checkbox here if you want to work in inches, I'm just going to leave mine in millimeters, whatever you choose, it doesn't really matter. Let's go over the very basic features of this. So right here you can see that we can actually move around our XYZ calibration cube. The left-hand side here you can see this is our move function, so we can move it along our x-axis with this arrow. We can use the green arrow here to move it along the y-axis, or we can use the blue arrow here to move it up and down. Now improves the slicer. It will automatically lock the object to the print bed. The reason for this is because if it wasn't on the print bed, you'd just be printing in midair and we definitely don't want to do that. So that is our move function. Next up we have our scale function. With our scale function, if we use the blue, like just the top one here, you'll notice that it will just scale it in the z-direction. I'm gonna go ahead and press Control Z on my computer here to go back, you can also just use the undo function here, which also has the forward function next to it. So that's how if you see me going back and forth between things that I'm doing on the computer screen. That's how I'm doing it is just with Control Z. So next up we can move it in just the x-direction, going this way. Again, Control Z, I'm going back. And again, same thing in the y-direction. All this is doing is basically stretching r dot STL file. So if we use one of the four corner arrows here, these are the orange ones. It will scale things proportionately, so it's scaling x, y, and z by the exact same amount. What I'm gonna do Control Z and that there is our scaling function. The next one that we have is our Rotate function. This one again, pretty simple as you can tell, all that we're doing is you can see right here we're rotating. We can also use, again, just using the red and the green different ways to orient our objects. This will be going over things like optimal object orientation later in the course. But again, we're just getting familiar with our 3D space here. So I'm going to go Control Z, Control Z. And now we have our calibration cube back on the bed. The last two right here. This one right here is placed on face. What this does is it will highlight the flat faces of your object, and it will let you basically just set it down how you want. So for example, if I click on the Y here, now the y is on our print bed. Now it doesn't seem like it's doing very much now because it is just a calibration cube. However, when you do import some 3D objects, you'll notice that it's very obvious that they need to be rotated 90 degrees or maybe a different amount. But what you can do is just go ahead and place that face on the print bed. So let's just go back here to where our axis lines up. So there we go. So you can see we have our x-ray here That's going parallel with the x-axis, same thing with the y, and same thing with our z-axis. The very last sort of main function here is on the left side is our cut plane. So what we can do if we press on the cut point, you'll notice that it gives us this plane right here, that it will indeed cut our objects. So what we do is you can have two options right here. Well, you have three except this one here that says rotate lower part upwards. I don't even worry about that. So what happens is we have keep up apart or keep lower part. Let me show you if we go ahead and we actually cut this object and we keep the upper part, you'll see it gets rid of the bottom half. And if I keep the lower part, you can see if I perform cut, it gets rid of the top. Now, if I keep both of them, you'll notice that here we have our cube, there are calibration cube is indeed cut in half. And for example, if I wanted to. Places on the face and maybe print these next to each other. That's how we do things like that. Again, it doesn't really make sense as to why you would do that with just this calibration cube. But once you start printing a bunch of different objects, it all home makes sense to you and basically is what I'm saying. So those are the four main options. So now let's go over the top options. So you'll see if we go to the top toolbar here, we basically have the option to import a file. If I click this, it pulls up our computer finder and then we can go and we can find a dot STL file to import. Alternatively, we can go and we can actually just delete a file like that. Or we can use the trash bin right here to delete a file. The next one right here is the Arrange tool. If I had multiple of these cubes. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna press Command C, which is copy, and then Command V, which is paste. And I'm just going to make a bunch of these cubes. Now, you can only see two cubes, but there's actually quite a few of them here. The reason for that is just that they are all one on top of each other. So if I go paste, paste, paste, I just added another three cubes right here. And what we can do is we can use the Arrange tool here and it will indeed arrange them. Let me show you one more. So if I go paste, you'll notice it's not in a very optimal spots. So if I press arrange, it does indeed put it into a more print friendly spot. I'm going to go Control Z back back and let's get our one single calibration cube back. Here it is. So next up on the list we have just copy and paste. This is again, I just use Command C or Command V, but you can use the copy and paste up here too if you want. The next one right here is the search function. I never use this, but if you wanted to maybe look up the layer height settings, for example, you could enter that in here. I'll just show you if I wanted to adjust just the layer height. You can see it actually brings it up right here and we can go and adjust those settings. I never use that. I don't think many people do and I don't think you will either. But just for reference, we do indeed have that. Now finally, what we have is the variable layer height option. We're going to discuss this later because that is a little bit more of an advanced setting. Now we have the side toolbar here figured out and this top toolbar here. Let's talk about this button down here. This is the preview button. This, if we click this, this is exactly what our printer is going to do now yours, if you did just click, that, will look a little bit different because I was already playing with some settings beforehand, but this right here is exactly what our printer does. So let's get out of that. And now let's talk about the options here in the right-hand side. So you can see that at the top here we have print settings and mine says 0.3 millimeters draft. These are the standard settings. It will come with pers a slicer just for reference, I typically keep it between 0.10.3 is 0.050.07 is very fine detail. That is just the layer height. We're going to talk about that in a second, but those are our standard print settings. Next is the filament that was those checkboxes from before that we were checking and importing. You'll see those and under your filaments section and again, you can add or remove filaments right there. Next up we have our printer. If you import a bunch of different printers, this is where you'll see them. If you have a different printer, it will just change the print bed right here to your current printer. So maybe if you ever Prusa as well as an end or you can import both of them, and it just makes it easy to switch back and forth. Additionally, it gives us three kind of hotkeys, I would call them to the supports, the infile, as well as the option for a brim. I wouldn't worry too much about this because we are going to change all of those additionally in our settings. And then you can see under object manipulation, that is our position rotation scale, size. And then you just have the toggle for inches or millimeters. Essentially what this is, Let's just go through them one by one from the top position. This is the position of the cube on the build plate. You'll see day is always changing as I move the cube. Next up is our rotation. I showed you this earlier with the rotate tool here. You can also, for example, rotate it 90 degrees in x. And that is just kind of what our rotation does. I wouldn't worry too much about that either. It is generally a lot easier to just use the visual guide here when we're using things like scale, rotation and position. But it does give you these as an option. So for example, on the side here, it also gives us the scale option. Let's say that we wanted to make this cube 200% bigger or twice as big. I do need to point out, you'll see this little lock function right here. This means is that any change to x will also be applied to Y and Z and vice versa. Basically, if you change one number, it will change them all. So you'll see there as I did 200, it's set everything to 200, no Control Z. I'm gonna bring our cube back to its regular size there. And I will show you if I take the lock off, what you'll get. And now if I change this to 200, it will basically just extend it in the X-direction by another 100% or two times total so that there is our main dashboard of Prusa slicer. Now let's jump in and let's talk about our print and filament settings. 11. Prusa Slicer Pt 2: Layer heights is the distance that our nozzle moves up every single layer. So right here you'll see this little layer. It will move up 0.3 millimeters and it will print the next one. If I zoom in a lot on here, you'll see them right here. It's gonna go, it's gonna print this layer and it's going to move up 0.3, move up 0.3. And you'll notice if we use this toggle right here, it will move at 0.3 millimeters. Every single line that it locks you to, that there is our layer height. Now that one's at 0.3, let me show you what happens if we put that at 0.1, let's say. And now we go back to plotter and we can slice this. And now you'll notice how many there are because instead of the nozzle moving up 0.3 millimeters each time it's now just moving up 0.1 millimeters. So you'll notice there's basically just a lot more layers. Because there's a lot more layers. It takes a lot longer to print. Printing at 0.1 millimeter layer height is very, very slow. Typical values are between, in general, 0.2 to 0.3. Like I said, 0.1 would be for a very precise print. The rule of thumb for the maximum layer heights is that it's 80% of the nozzle diameter. So for example, if I bring my calculator here, let me just show you we're using a 0.4 millimeter nozzle if you just bought an FDM printer and this is your first time going through it, there's a 99% chance that the nozzle on there is a 0.4 millimeter nozzle. If I take 0.4 and I multiply that by 80%, it will give us our maximum layer heights, so times 0.8 and this will be 0.3 to the maximum height, the maximum layer height that you should print with a zero-point for nozzle is 0.32. So again, what I'm talking about, slow versus fast printing, what I want to print really fast, I'll put that to 0.32, which is the maximum that you can do for a 0.4 millimeter nozzle. Next one we have here is the first layer height. Now we have layer height and then we have first layer height. What the first layer height is doing is essentially we're always going to make that slightly less than our layer height because our first layer we wanted squished into the print bed just a little bit more than the other ones, just to improve the adhesion between the actual 3D print that we're making and that print bed so that when our axis is moving, the object is not tempted to fall off or become dislodged from the actual print beds. So let's just set these back to standard. You'll notice it comes in at 0.3 and then 0.2, that is our layer height. Next up, we have vertical shells. So let's start with perimeters. What our perimeters are, are actually, let's talk about perimeters as well as our horizontal shells, top and bottom layers as well. So you'll see we have solid layers top, bottom, and we have vertical shelves, perimeters. What I'm gonna do is I'm just going to show you exactly what these are. I'm gonna set this to five. I'm going to set our top layers to two, and then I'm going to set our bottom to ten. The reason I'm doing this is just to show you, if I go into our platter here, then I slice this. Let me show you exactly what those are. So let's just bring this slider all the way down here to our very first layer. And we can see this year is layer number one. Okay, Now we had, remember we had bottom, we hit top and we had perimeters essentially with our cube right here. If I bring this out, our top layer is going to be up here right above the Z. It's gonna be this part. Our bottom layer is going to be right here and then our perimeters are the outskirts of this actual cubes. So therefore, when I slice it, our bottom layers are going to have whatever we put in there. So if I go to Print Settings and I go here, our bottom, we put ten layers. So there's actually going to be ten layers of filament on the bottom of this print. So you'll see here on the very bottom, this will be 12345678910. I think I got it right. If I did, this next layer will be the infile. And there you go. You can see that there is our bottom amount of layers. Now our perimeters, we can see these very clearly here we have five of them, so this is 12345. And then again, we just do the same thing to show you what our top layers are if I scroll up to the top here. Now this one might be slightly confusing just because of the Z here. The Z is actually imprinted so the top layers are in the red. So you'll see that we have top layers right here. And then inside of the Z, this is actually also a top layer because you'll notice that the zed, like I said, it's imprinted. So the top layer of the Z there is that inside part. So let me just show you, I believe we set that to two. So if I go down two layers, there you go. You see the infile on this side. And then again, that will happen by the zed, so 12, and then that is our top layers. Hopefully that makes sense. Like I said, we have bottom, we have perimeter, and then we have the top. Let's go back into our sprint settings. Now you'll see this option here for spiral vase. This is just a fancy print option. If you are printing something that only needs one single perimeter, what it will do is it will actually hollow out the entire object and just print it continuously along the outside. And that's why it's called a vase because frankly, this would be very useful if you were doing something like printing a flower vase or the shape of it is just basically one shape that goes out. It's hollow on the inside and it doesn't have a top. Let me show you exactly what that would look like. We're just going to have to accept all these settings. And let's replace it so you'll notice there it got rid of all of the inside and it gets rid of the top. And you'll notice that there is just one single line that goes around on the outside that is called Vizmode or vase mode. You'll see it in pretty much all slicing software. So now let's just go back to default settings. You can press this little arrow here and it will reset everything back. The next one there is minimum shell thickness. We're going to talk in great detail about that in the more advanced section. Just leave that standard as it is for now. The next one is seen position. This is kind of a more advanced setting, but let's talk about it now because it is here. So CME position, basically what happens is for example, when the printer is printing this cube, as we know it does it layer by layer. But what happens is when it finishes one layer, it needs a location to start the second layer. And that's what seemed position is. For example, let me print this to the rear and let me show you what I mean. So if I slice this, Let's go ahead One second here. Let's make sure that we have infill turned on for this. It just turned it off because of the vase mode there that we put on. So now we have seen position set to the rear. Let's slice this and let me show you exactly what I mean. So if I pretty much pick any location along this cube and I use this bottom slider here. This will show us the exact tool head location now, because we have the scene position set to the rear, you'll notice it starts in the middle of the back of the print. Now if I go up to the next layer or really any layer, when I go back there, you'll see again the tool head is starting in the back at the middle of our print. And sometimes if you have a giant print or any complex materials there will, it will leave a little seam. And that's why it is called the theme settings so that there is arsine position. I would just leave that at whatever it keeps it to as a standard. Now, this is Prusa 2.4, which is the newest one, and I believe they just added this fuzzy skin option here. I would completely ignore this. All that's doing is it's adding texture to the outside of your print. So if you're printing like a dumbbell for example, or something, they required grip, you might use fuzzy skin setting because it would just increase the friction on your print. Basically, I would just ignore that. You probably won't ever used that, but nonetheless, let's keep going. So let's go to infill. Infill density is a percentage that your 3D print is filled with plastic. Now, what this means is basically when we go to print that cube, we're not going to print it as a 100% solid piece of plastic because that would be a wasting time and beat wasting materials. So what we do is we set an infill value. Let me show you if we set this to 5%, I go ahead and I slice this. You'll notice that this red line here, only 5% of this cube is actually going to be filled with material. Whereas if I go back and I said that five to, let's say 80%. Then we go and we slices cube. You'll notice now it is 80% of the void space is filled. And you might be thinking, Hey, that's cool. Cubic or honeycomb pattern wherever that is, that's our next settings. If we go back into our settings, the Fill pattern is currently set to grid. Now the only two that I pretty much ever use our grid as well as Guy road or wherever you call it. And I'll just show you the difference in the patterns. Let's just set this to 50 so you can see it. We'll be talking about this later in the course as well. So don't worry too much about it. But this right here is the gyro head or thyroid setting, however you pronounce it, that is just the different infill pattern. Next up we have the top fill pattern. What this one's doing is it's basically just saying, if you need your print to look really good, perhaps you're printing something like a thin logo and it was a really big logo. So you wanted that top layer to look really good. You might want to change the top fill pattern. Honestly, you don't really need to, but it's just a setting in case you want to play with it. I'll show you what I mean here in the software. So by scroll up, as I said, this right here is our top fill. And you'll notice this red line here is kind of just zigzagging along. That is what we're changing. So if I change this to, let's say concentric now it will do it in a circular pattern. You see it Here. It is now going in circles. That's just the top full pattern. Like I said, it's maybe use if you're printing like a really big surface area, but flat logo, something like that you might want to consider. It must jump back in here and now we have bottom fill pattern. It's just the exact same thing. Okay, and now the next one here we have skirt and brim. Now typically we would only use one of these at a time. Let's just go through them. So skirt it. Is that material on the outside that you were seeing. Let me show you here. So you've seen this green material here. What this is is it's basically just purging out material around our object to make sure that when it goes to actually print our 3D object, there isn't something like a nozzle clog or maybe if you change different types or colors of filament, what it does is it gets at old filament out of the nozzle. This one right here is a skirt and you'll notice that it lets us change the distance. So if I went from two to say 40, this would be really dramatic, but I just wanted to show you visually. You'll notice that now our skirt has all the way along the outside here. So that is skirt now brim, let me show you when we would maybe use a brand. So let's say that our calibration cube here, Let's just scale it really, really tall. So now what we have is a very not ideal thing to print because what's happening is the print bed is gonna be moving as we know, and then our print is gonna be so tall that there's a chance that it does fall over. So what we might want to do is actually add a brim to this. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go back here and I'm gonna go to a brim. And let's say that we make this a 20 millimeter brim. Let me show you what that does. And you'll notice that it does indeed lay a bunch of material around the first layer of our print. So this way, there is a less chance that our print does actually topple over and that there is our brim setting next up. It support material. I'm gonna leave support material off for now. What we're gonna do is we're actually going to do a full video dedicated to creating supports when to use supports, all that kind of information. So for now, we can ignore support material. Let's go into filament settings. This right here are the only part that you really need to worry about is the temperature. This coordinates directly to our filaments settings that we have where here. So like I said, if I change this from PLA2 PET g, it will automatically populate these with the corresponding value. So you shouldn't actually even need to touch this as long as you select the right filament on the outside. The other one that I do want to point out is the cost. What you can do is you can actually put your cost, and let's say that I spend $30 per kilogram of filament when I actually go through and I slice my 3D print in our bottom view here, it will give you tons of information. This is really cool. It'll tell you exactly how much filament you use. It'll tell you in grams, it'll tell you the cost. Now this cost is based on the amount of filament that you use timed the price that you put in there. So you can see this cube right here. If my filament was $30 per kilogram would cost 89. Sense that there is our basic settings for Prusa slicer, so that should be enough to get you started. The only other thing that you need to do is go ahead and export G code. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna put that on the SD card that came with your printer, put that into your printer and then hit Print and you are good to go. So hopefully that helps. Like I said, this is just the introduction part to pursue a slicer in a video later on the course, I'm going to go through every single setting and go over the expert modes, if you will, for proofs, a slicer. So go ahead and play with that. How some fun download some files from Thingiverse, put them in their slice them, and then I'll see you guys in the next lesson. It's getting exciting because now we're actually really jumping in and doing stuff. So I can't wait. 12. Support Settings Explained: Welcome to this lesson. This lesson today we're talking about supports and support structures now. First things first, do not at all be intimidated about supports. Okay, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Everyone is so scared of printing more support or they try to avoid it at all costs. But in reality, if you just understand where they go, why they go there, and how to put them there. Then there's really nothing at all to worry about. All we're doing is we're changing a little bit of the settings of our output file. And then as usual, we're letting our printer take care of all of the work. So in this lesson, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to give you a little bit of theory behind supports. And then I'm actually going to jump in and go over an example of supporting a really popular and cool file for you guys. This way, you'll understand it and then I'll show you how I do it as well as all of my settings. And just like usual, frankly, you can just copy my settings and apply those to yours and your prints. So let's jump into that now. I'm gonna show you the theory now and then I'll see you in a minute for the actual example file. Yes, let's talk about supports. This is extremely important and it's one of the skills that you have to learn if you want to be able to print things. Here is the general rule. Essentially, you cannot print something if there is no material underneath it. Now, what this means is that if you look at the geometry of your object, it always must have material underneath it. If there is no material underneath it, we need to add supports or your print, it will probably fail. Let me explain what the classic Y and T example. You see the Y here. Essentially this y is going to print absolutely fine. It's at 45 degrees or over, you're pretty much good. There's no support required. However, if we look at the T here, it's basically at 90 degrees or 0 degrees. Essentially it's just horizontal. So we do indeed need supports or the printer will end up just spitting out filament into mid air. I'll show you what I mean on the screen here as you can see, the print material here with a t is extruding, but it will literally just fall to the ground because it doesn't have material underneath it. Honestly, chances are guys you're gonna learn the hard way. Eventually what you'll do is you'll print something and it will fail and you'll go, Oh, I definitely needed supports there. That's why it failed. Don't worry, we've all done it. I still occasionally do it when I'm doing something really fast. So I recommend. My last recommendation is that I recommend learning how to use manual supports. Basically what this is is where you yourself have to go in and click on the object to add in those supports manually. If you use the automatic supports in your slicing software, it will likely use a lot more material and a lot more support than you actually need. Alright, now that we've done some of the theory, let's actually jump in and talk about my support settings. And let me show you how I would prepare a file for printing with supports. Now, This one's gonna be fun. I actually designed this file right here in SOLIDWORKS. You can see this here is our skateboard thing from earlier. And then around it is this big shell. It's kind of like Coupa shell from Mario or wherever it is. And you can see that this here is indeed the shell that's in multiple pieces. So that being said, one of those pieces is right here on our print bed. Now, you'll notice that it is obvious this piece is going to need some supports, will see the underrate here is gonna be hanging in midair. And also this section right here could also probably use some support. So how are we actually going to go about printing this object? Now, you can't see this is one of the outer perimeter pieces of the shell. And when I was designing this, I could have also designed it to be printed without supports, but it would've been many more pieces. For example, I could have gone and I could have split this file in half and printed them both vertically on the bed. But then again, we're taking one piece for now making two pieces or we just add in a little bit of support right here. So let's talk about our support settings. The very first thing like I probably already mentioned is we do not use auto-generated supports. If you use auto-generated supports, it will just put supports everywhere. It basically just goes and it plays it safe. Let me show you what this would look like with auto-generated supports on. You'll notice there's quite a few supports. It's actually not too too bad with this print here. We probably wouldn't need these, but this one's not too bad generally, when we use auto printed or auto-generated supports, it makes a ton of supports all over your objects. So I honestly, I would highly recommend do not use auto-generated supports and learn where and why and how we're going to put in the supports, which is what we're gonna do right now. So first things first, I am just using PLA. This is a standard generic PLA profile point to speed. None of that stuff really matters because all we're doing is we're talking about the supports. But you'll notice right away from the beginning, generate support material. I checked that auto-generated supports. I uncheck that. First thing that we need to know is if we go to the top contact z distance, this is one of the most important settings. It should be set to 0.2. Now, depending on what version of Prusa slicer you have, it might be set to 0.1, makes sure that's at 0 to the next setting is the top interface layers. Now this one is definitely a preference. However, my opinion, I like to leave it on 0, no interface layers. I find it much easier to actually remove the supports from the object with no interface layers. So I would encourage you to try a few different settings and see what you like. But I believe that 0 is the best for me and that there is the support settings that I use. It's very simple. Again, like I always mentioned, Prusa does the vast majority of the work, especially for something basic like adding supports to just a PLA print. Once we get to TPU prints, I will go over the settings again because there is different support settings for when printing in TPU. Let's go ahead and jump back into the platter and let me show you what we have to do now. So first thing that we have to do is identify the locations that will need supports added in. Now obviously, it's gonna be this tab right here. And I think this is a floating tab. Yes, so it will be this one right here. Potentially, this area here could also use supports. The easiest way to do this, I usually just slice the object and this helps us go through and we can check out where we will need those supports. So everything seems to be pretty well attached and connected. And then you'll notice this starts printing in mid air. So if I go back, you'll see, you can see this material right here. This is printing in midair, so it obviously needs to have some supports there. As we go up. You'll notice this part, this part right here. It would definitely work without supports, but I will add some supports just for completion as it will help the quality of the print. And then again, you'll notice this tab right here starts printing in midair. So we need to add supports in there. Now, at the bottom you see I believe that the auto-generated supports added in supports all around this perimeter. We don't need to add those that will print totally fine. And I also know this because I have already printed it. So full disclosure a half. I do know what I'm doing here, so let's go ahead, let's add in some support. So how we do this is I always use the brush on tool. Now what this does is it basically change, it changes your cursor into a brush. So you'll see here I can now paint on our object Command Z. I'm gonna get rid of that. And let's go ahead. And so if you left-click with your mouse, it will be blue and blue means support enforcer. So what that will do is it will create support. So all I'm gonna do, I'm gonna paint this area here blue because I do want supports on it. Now, this brush size is really small, so let's go ahead and let's make this brush a little bit bigger. And we can see now I have this part painted in blue. And that looks pretty good as it is. So like I mentioned, I also wanted to do this piece right here. I think just adding in some blue along here will help the quality. And there was that other tab that is right here. I'm gonna go ahead and just simply paint this one here blue as well. Now, what you'll notice is sometimes when you're painting away, it kind of paints in 3D and you'll notice that now they're supports on the inside here. I want to get rid of that, so I'll right-click, which will make it red. And the red basically just cancels out the blue as the red is to block all support. So I don't want supports inside of the little circles here is that will pretty much just make them messy for no point at all because they do not need to be in there. I'm gonna go ahead and just get rid of those. That looks good to me. Now let's go ahead and let's check on these ones so that looks good. There's no supports inside there. Now there is all this support material on the back. It doesn't really matter if it doesn't need supports. Person slicer won't add the mandible. But again, we'd go ahead and we can just cancel these out by right-clicking, which paints them red, which is indeed a support blocker. So again, we can just go get rid of this stuff. Now the other settings that you can play with over here are the different types of brushes, the size of the brush, etcetera. I usually recommend to just stick with the standard settings that it gives you. And now let's go ahead and let's slice this object and let's see what we got. We can see we now have support over here, which is exactly where we put them. And none of them are in this area here. Because in this area what I'm actually doing is I'm inserting a kind of nuts and bolts and I want it to be super clean there and that looks perfect. Now if we go over here, we can basically see the same scenario is we just put in those supports where we need them. And finally, this tab right here, this looks fantastic as well. You'd see there is one support there, so maybe we missed an area with blue and there it is, bingo, you can see that's what it was coming from. So if I slice this, now that one support that was hanging out there is gone. And you can see that this here is basically the perfect support settings. Let's go through and let's slice this model up and see how it looks. So you'll see from the bottom it prints are support structures, right? Once we get floating material right here, it jumps in and basically they print on top of the supports. Now, this same thing should occur for both of these areas here. And it does as you can see right here, it's always printing on top of our supports. That looks fantastic. And one more time right here, you can see that we have nothing printing in mid air. And that's pretty much all there is to it guys. So like I mentioned, we can either take five-minutes, added the supports, or we end up splitting up a bunch of objects, having a glue them together or whatever it may be. So don't be scared of support because supports can enable us to print things that we previously couldn't print before. And it can just make our life easier by having actually less things to print because we don't have to split everything up to avoid those support. So I hope this lesson helps. Like I mentioned, there's just those two important settings in the actual Creusa slicer, which are contact Z distance as well as the interface layers. Remember contexts, z distance makes sure it's at least as 0.2. That's at least what I use. And then also for the interface layers, I put it to 0. You can put it to one or two if you'd like, but I would encourage you to try both settings and that is it for this video guys. That's all for supports. Hopefully that helps and puts you on your way. So you should be good and confident to print pretty much anything now. So I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 13. Bed Levelling: Hey guys and welcome to this lesson. In this lesson we're talking about bed leveling now, bed leveling is one of, if not, maybe even the most important things that we're going to do over the duration of this course because we cannot have successful prints without a proper level bed. Now there is a little bit of margin that we have. The bed doesn't have to be 100% level, but let's say it probably has to be about 99% or maybe even 99.5%. Basically, what happens is This right here is the bed. We can see on the Prusa, the bed doesn't actually change. But if you're using an NDR or CR tan or something like that, you'll notice the turn screws on the bottom of the bed. What these do is they actually changed the angle of the bed and our goal is to always have that 100% flat. Now the reason for this is because we want the nozzle and the bed to be perfectly parallel and we don't want a basically change of distance in-between the nozzle and the bed because what that would do is either compress our filament in or leave extra space if it was too far away, and that would increase the probability of a print failure. Now, the good news is that once you learn how to do this, honestly, it takes like maybe thirty-seconds to level the bed perfectly once you get used to it. But please do be patient with this process as when you're just starting out, it might take a couple of tries to actually get the bed perfectly level. So if we look at a machine like the Prusa here, it actually has a little probe. That probe does is it goes and it will go in nine spots. And it will actually just calculate the distance between the nozzle or from the probe to the bed. And then it will determine how far away the extruder head should be from the bed to give us our first layer, a perfect first layer. Now if you're using one of those other machines that actually has a turn screws, what we need to do is level the bed perfectly. And the general rule of thumb is that if you use an eight by 11 sheet of paper and you make that the distance between the nozzle and the print bed, that will ensure a perfect first layer every time. And that's what I'm going to go into detail right now about how to do that now please do now. There are a few different ways to do this. The most common one being to check the corners with the nozzle and an eight by 11 sheet of paper. And just to make sure that there is a little bit of friction on the paper. That's a method that I'll be showing you here. I think it's the best, it's the easiest, essentially, once you know how to do that and you can do that quickly, it'll take you maybe ten seconds to level the bed perfectly after each print. So that's what we're gonna be going through right now. Make sure to follow along, do this one and then I'll see you guys in the next video. Wait, most important, probably of all is bed leveling and z upset. I repeat this is probably the most important thing at all. If you're about to stop this video, you're bored, you're sick of listening to me. Well, probably listen to this one more thing. Now's a good time if you do like this video, if it's helping you, Oh, go ahead. Do hit that subscribe button and that Like button has that helps me out. But nonetheless, let's talk about the leveling and the Z offset. The goal is essentially to have a print bed that is 100% level. Meaning if we literally took a level to it, it would be perfectly level in the x and y directions. Then what we want is for the nozzle to be the perfect distance above that print bed. Let some of the plastic comes out and it's extruded and just pressed into the print bed a little bit so that it does adhere and create a solid foundation for the rest of the print. Basically, if this first layer is not a perfect or within some range of perfection, what might happen is that at some point in time through our one to even 200, our prints or print could actually fall off and cause a printf failure. And yes, I'm not kidding. I have done 208 prints. So how do we accomplish this? Well, I'm gonna be using a Prusa here, so it's a little bit easier because you don't have to adjust the height of the bed. These are definitely my favorite machines, but I have, or at least I used to have about 20 enters that literally ran 247 and I always had to manually adjust. Oh, so let's do this. The easiest way to do it is to actually unscrew all of the screws at the bottom of your bed and then just turn them all about five rotations at a time, which will level up or down all of the corners evenly. Basically just repeat this process until the bed is almost touching the nozzle and then at that point in time, grab a sheet of basic eight by 11 paper, put it under the nozzle and make it so that the tip of the nozzle is just lightly touching that piece of paper. You should still be able to slide around that piece of paper, but there should be a little bit of friction. I'll show you in the video here. Now what we want to do is go to the top left corner, do that exact same thing, then go to the bottom-right, do the same thing, then go to the top-right, do the same thing, and then the bottom left. Now that order doesn't actually matter that much before anyone gets all crazy in the comments saying you should do it this way or that way. Let's keep in mind here that we're adjusting by about 1 tenth of a millimeter. So just go ahead and make sure that all four corners, as well as the middle of the print bed have that friction between the piece of paper. Now people all day are gonna be arguing this on Facebook. Just ignore them. The best way to tell if you've done it right is if your first layer looks something like this. Now if it looks like this, that means that the nozzle is too high off the bed. And if it looks like this, that means that the nozzle is to close. This part of 3D printing will likely be really frustrating at the beginning, but I promise you like within a couple of weeks you'll be able to level the print bed in 20 seconds or less, and you'll do it perfectly. 14. TPU Printing: Hey guys and welcome to this lesson. This one's really fun. You're probably wondering what all of this stuff is. Well, today, in this lesson we're talking about printing in TPU. Yes, TPU is that rubber-like material that has lots of flex to it. All of the parts on the table here are printed in TPU and these are actually parts of my company manufactures and sells. They are accessories for this right here that is called a one-week. For example, this right here is just a little fender that goes on. These ones are actually for a bigger version of this, but they basically just covered the tire so that none of the water gets on your legs and stuff when you're writing it. This one right here is a rim protector. So it actually goes around the outside of the room here. It's gonna be tough for me to install this from the other side, but you can kind of see what I'm getting at. Here we go. This is how this one fits on there. There's all types of different things that we make this as just a few of them, but all of these are printed in TPU. So what we're gonna do today, I'm gonna get rid of this. I'm gonna show you my TPU settings. The print settings is support settings, all that good stuff because TPU is a, it's amazing to print with. You can make really cool things like all of these. But B, it can be kind of difficult to print with if you don't have your settings, right? So what we're gonna do, we're gonna jump into Prusa slicer here. I'm gonna go over to Files. I'm going to show you my settings for those files so that you can kind of match those up if that's what you want to use. It actually print those and do a time-lapse of this 3D prints. So you can see our models all the way from the computer, all the way to the print. And then you can see the quality that these settings do make. I will note the TPU that we use is linked in the gear less. It's the same stuff that's on the printer right now. They have actually changed their schools from plastic to cardboard, which is really good to see as that's good for the environment. But that is exactly what's on the printer right now, and that's exactly what all of these are made of. So let's jump into the settings right here and let's talk about how to print TPU. Okay, so let's jump into our print settings and let's go through all of these off the bat. So the first thing we see is layer height. Now, I will note this is the only time that the first layer height should or can really exceed our standard layer height. The reason for this is because essentially when TPU comes out of the nozzle, it's almost like glue. It adheres very well to everything. And because of that, we a, we don't actually need to use adhesive on the print bed. And B, we don't need that first layer super compressed in order to have a successful print because it will stick really well to the print bed. So I would recommend putting this up to 0.3. The other thing that's worth noting is if you're printing TPU and you're having problems, one of the first things to check is how compressed that first layer is because that can lead to problems even up to the 50th or the 100 layer of your print if that first layer is to compress, next up we have perimeters. There's nothing super special that we need to take into account for that. And then as we go through, we can see horizontal shells. This is all fine. None of these settings need to be changed. Now next up infile, Again, infill, we don't need to change many settings. I will note that when you're printing in TPU, the infile will directly correlate to essentially how flexible the different parts are. As you can see, this one here is printed at 20% infill and it has a lot of flex to it. Same with these parts right here. It's also because they're generally quite thin, but just keep that in mind that based on the percentage of info will determine how flexible it actually comes out. Let's keep going here. So skirt and brand, we can leave those totally fine support material. This is where things get really interesting. So let's go to the platter and I'm gonna move this kind of O-ring right here off to the side. And let's talk about what is our XLR plug right now. So the thing about this XLR plug, you can tell that it's going to need supports and it's going to need supports all around this outer perimeter right here. So there is a dedicated video in this course to supports, but this is just a separate little section on if you are using supports with TPU. Now, the first thing I will know is that it's best to not ever need supports when using TPU if you are designing your own prints, just make sure that you design them such that they do not require supports. But if you do, for whatever reason you need supports, this file right here, there was no better way to make it bend to require supports, but this is how we're going to support it. So first things first is we're going to use the paint on supports. Again, there's gonna be a whole video in this course. You may have already taken it, you may be coming up, but we're going to use the paint on supports and we're just going to indicate exactly where we want the supports, which is going to be all around this outer perimeter right here. So let me just show you that. Now you can see that what we're doing is we are enhancing it. So the only place it's going to put supports is around the perimeter here. The reason for this is because supports in TPU can be really hard to take off. It's the same reason that TPU prints to the TPU sticks to the print bed really well, like I said, it's basically like glue when it comes out of the nozzle and we don't want a lot of that touching our print, especially when it's in supports because we're going to take it off. It can actually damage our print. What we do is we go into Print Settings right here and let's go through them. So the first thing is generate support material. We need to have this turned on, but then auto-generated supports, I always, always turn that off. We can just leave that as it is. Like I said, we're going to paint on our supports every time the grid style is fine. This is where things get important. Top contact, z, distance. Is 0.2. We need this to be 0.2. If you have it to 0.1 or 0, what's going to happen is that those support, the support material is actually going to be touching our actual print and you're not gonna be able to get it off and you're just going to ruin your print trying to do so. So that's that I will just slice this. I can show you it. So let's say that I left it to, well, let's put it to 0.1. Let's see if we can see the difference. So at 0.1, when I go ahead and I slice this, what I'm mentioning right here is this distance. You can see it just barely but the distance between this blue line right here and the supports that is gonna be 0.1 millimeters. If I go back out of this, Let's go ahead and let's make this 0.2. And let's see if Prusa slicer will show us. There you go. I think you can see the difference. There is more space now between the actual print and the supports. Again, the reason for that is so that when we go to remove those supports, we can actually do so and that they won't be fused onto our print. So that is the first thing is make sure we have that at 0.2. The next thing that I always do is the top interface layers. It defaulted to two. I always just put this to 0 just because it's easier to remove the supports. This is just my preference. Depending on the object that you're printing, I would encourage you to play with the settings, but that there is a good starting point. Now the next one and probably the most important one is the x-y separation distance between the object and the supports. Let me explain quickly what that is. As I go through here, we can slice this again. And if I look at the bottom, we'll notice that this support material is just slightly away from the bottom of our print. Let me zoom in here a lot so you can see this is a perimeter of our actual 3D print and then our support start right here. So there is a little bit of distance in between them. If I go back into my print settings and let's say I set this to two, which will be two millimeters. If you express it as a percent, it'll be a percent, whereas a number it will be in millimeters. And now let me just show you the distance. You can see now there's a huge distance between our support material and the actual 3D print. Now, the reason again for this is because we don't want the support material touching our 3D print. Otherwise it will fuse to it and it makes it really hard to pull it off. So this right here, obviously this wouldn't be ideal because then all of this material right here is going to be printing without supports. What we want to do is find a happy medium. The best for this is probably going to be around 0.5 millimeters. Let's see what that looks like. And you know what? I think we could actually go a little bit less, maybe try 0.4 millimeters, and I think that will give us the best quality. Let's see. There we go at that will be perfectly fine there. So now we have just a little bit of space in-between our support material and are printed object. Now if I go and I scroll this down, I can show you it from the top. So that is this distance right here is now 0.4 millimeters and that should be perfect. The quality of this sprint will be a okay, That's that part right there. Now, the other setting that I wanted to really point out is if we go back up to our layers and perimeters and we have this on, Let's go to expert mode. And Bray here, avoid crossing perimeters. This one's really important whenever I'm printing in TPU, I leave this checks no matter what I'm printing, I always leave that one check. The reason is is because let me just show you in here. It's probably easier to show you with our o-ring that I have. So let's bring this in here and let's forget about the XLR plug right now. Let's slice this and you can see that. Let's go to the point where we can actually see the toolpaths. So this is our nozzle head and you'll notice that as I play it, the nozzle head just keeps circling and circling. It won't actually crossover the perimeters of the print. And why this is really good is because TPU tends to ooze out of your nozzle and it creates what's called stringing. If we haven't talked about stringing, we'll be talking about that soon. But basically what it is is a little bit extra of the material is coming out when it's not supposed to be. And that leaves little imperfections on our prints. So to avoid that as much as possible, we go into our print settings there and we click on the Avoid crossing perimeters. That is one that I always leave on for all of our TPU prints. I'm going to try and show you it again here. Wherever our two-headed is. Let's go up a little bit. Just give me a tough time because this guy is there. I'm going to delete this, slice it. I just want to really make this point clear because I do encourage everyone to leave that setting always isn't it? So here we go. You can see that the tool head again, it's just going in circles and circles instead of it actually crossing over like this. Now, that will increase your print time by maybe 10, 15% on the time-frame. But again, a trust me, it will be 100% worth it. For example, with this rim protector right here, the print nozzle would basically only be going in circles and it wouldn't actually crossover. The perimeters got improves the quality of our print. So those are my tips from printing with TPU. Again, it's not super complicated. It is something that you can just go in there and set up one time and then basically never have to think about it again. Just go ahead and save that on your ST smart TPU profile, I recommend using the TPU that is linked in the gear list. It's exactly what we use, it's exactly what all of these are made from. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to print these, show you a cool little time-lapse of it, then that will be it for this lesson. So TPU is one of my favorite materials. You can make some really, really cool things and also some super functional things. Like I said, all of these are extremely functional. We manufacture these, we sell them. And if you're actually interested in seeing how we sell them, I do have a course that's on Skillshare here. It's my Etsy course and it will show you the behind the scenes of my Etsy shop where we actually make these and sell them. We ship them globally. And it's kind of cool to see the behind the scenes if that's something that you're interested in. So that's it for this one guys, I really like TPU. Don't be scared to print with TPU at the beginning, it's likely you'll have a couple of failed prints, but trust me, it's a fantastic material once you figure it out. And like I said, you only really have to figure it out and optimize at one time. So that's it for this lesson. I'll show you guys the time lapses of these prints now, and I'll see you in the next one. All right. We're back. Those two prints are done. They're sitting in front of me right here, and I will obviously include a close-up so that you can't see them. But they worked out really great. As I mentioned, the supports for this one came off really easily and they both printed in high-quality and they will indeed be functional, which is exactly what we're looking forward now, I was setting up the time lapse rate before the printer and then I realized that I should actually just make an entire video on that time lapse rate because I do get a lot of questions about how we actually make those cool, time-lapse videos of the prints. I'll put one here just so that you can't see it. And so do you know what I'm talking about? But yes, we are done with our TPU now there is to other settings that I do want to mention. The first of which is being speed. I realized that I didn't mention this before. Now when it comes to speed, I typically just leave mine at the standard 45 or 50 millimeters per second. That comes with the profile that works for me. However, when you're just starting out, if you don't have your printer completely tuned or you're just getting used to printing with TPU and the new filament, you should actually lower that to even around, say, 25 to 35 millimeters per second to just start out. And that will basically just increase the probability of your successful prints when you're just starting out. That's setting number one. Setting number two, I was gonna leave this for the advanced settings section of Prusa slicer. However, I do want to mention it right now and that's setting is under the Output options and it's called complete individual objects. Now what this does is it actually, it's very smart. It makes a printer finish one object before it actually moves to the next, instead of doing the first layer one and then the first layer of the next one. And then going one-by-one, it does one whole object and then it moves to the next. So for example, on the print bed, if I had this piece here and this one here, hopefully you can see this. It would print this entire object and then move over and print this one. That's another great setting. If for example, you wanted to print, say, ten of these ones here, what that does is it just reduces the travel time and the amount of stringing In your prints. So that is it for this TPU section. Hopefully that helps. Hopefully you guys are maybe ordering some TPU right now and trying it out because it is, like I mentioned, one of my favorite materials and I highly, highly recommend becoming proficient with it because it opens up a lot of options when it comes to functional printing. So that's it. I hope this helped and I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 15. Setting for Fast Printing Pt1: Hey guys and welcome to this lesson. This lesson is one of my favorites because now we're getting slightly more technical and we're gonna talk about slow versus fast print settings. So why is this important? Well, what happens is one print could take up to 25 hours, where if we just simply adjust some of the settings, maybe it only takes five hours and that is a huge difference, especially it maybe you have two or three of them or even maybe a 100 of them that you have to print. It's really important to know how you can speed up your prints and to what extent you can speed them up while maintaining quality. Let's jump into proofs. A slicer, like I said, I'm just gonna take a basic file from Thingiverse and I'm gonna show you my settings for essentially slow prints and also for fast sprints. So let's open up Prusa slice array here. Hopefully you can see this, this year is the Nintendo logo. I believe you've probably seen this on some gaming consoles or in the media, something like that. So here is our Nintendo logo. Now, on the right side you'll see that we have our quality, our generic PLA, and then our machine type again, we've already been through this in the basic process settings part, but let's start with slow setting. So the slowest that I would ever print something at these Honestly 0.15 millimeters. I don't think I've ever actually printed below that layer height. Now, again, remember the 0.15 is indeed our layer heights. If I go to Print Settings, Check over our layers, you'll see it auto populates this with 0.15. Now, again, that's the z-axis going up by 0.15 millimeters each time. That is a very precise print. So when it comes to printing slow 0.15, if you need something to look amazing, that is probably what I would do. You can obviously you can go down to 0.05 or 0.07, but let me even just show you the difference between 0.05, then 0.015. So if I slice this right here, we can see it's just loading up. And then what we are concerned about right now is the print times. You can see in normal mode, this is gonna take one day and seven, sorry, one day, six hours and seven minutes where the one day is 24 hours. So 24 hours plus the six hours, that's 30 hours and seven minutes just to print this little thing right here. And that's because of that layer height enough, we go out of this. And let's go to the 0.15 that I mentioned. Let's slice the same thing. So we're at 30 hours and you can see now it's only at seven hours, so it makes a huge difference. This is one of the most important settings, like I mentioned, if you had only one of these to print, maybe it's not that important, but you'll probably find yourself in a situation where you want to print maybe ten or 20 or 30 of the same item. And that's when it's really important to understand these settings. So like I said, 0.15 millimeters under your layer height that there is pretty much the most precise setting that I would go with the rest of this honestly, I would just leave auto populated. Prusa does an amazing job with their settings. I think I've already discussed this, but this is one of the reasons why our company is so heavily invested in the Prusa ecosystem is because they've taken the time to actually go through and make the perfect set of settings for your printer. Now, Let's go through these one-by-one and just talk about them. So again, the first layer height, you'll notice that this first layer height is actually larger than the other layer heights just because, again, with 0.15 millimeters, like the z-axis is hardly moving up, but we are going to start at 0.2 millimeters because we want to just slightly squished into the bed. If the first layer was at 0.15, it would be squishing the filament quite a bit into the bed. And it might actually be hard to pull your print off in the end. So that's that part right there. In terms of solid layers. Again, this is the higher definition print, so I would pretty much just leave all of that now infill, you can always experiment with the infilled depending on the function of your print. Of course, if you need something to be super-strong, increase that infill. The other thing I will know is that if you need something to be super-strong, I would also go through in your print settings and the easiest one to do is to increase your perimeters, maybe go-to for forests, my functional parts starting points. If I'm making something that is holding a load or something that's under pressure for perimeters is a really good starting point for that. The rest of this stuff is pretty straightforward. You'll notice that our speed, I do want to note this. It starts at 45 millimeters per second. Now that is quite slow. 45 millimeters per second for our perimeters is quite slow. The rest of this stuff, I would just leave auto populate it as it is. Let's keep going through this. So let's just go over the overall print time for this one here we can see we get nine hours and 13 minutes. That would be a pretty high definition print of this little 3D Logo thing. The other thing I want to mention is under our Print Settings, you'll notice that there's actually two different kind of categories of each of them. So you'll see we have 0.15 quality versus 0.15 speed. The same thing for 0.2. And then 0.3 is just draft because 0.3 is a pretty big layer height. Now the difference between 0.15 quality and 0.15 speed. Let's check that out right now. So if I go 0.15 quality, Let's slice now and let's see what print time we get. And you can see we get seven hours and 28 minutes right down here. Let's go ahead. Let's go back and let's set this one to 0.15 speed. Let's see how big of a difference that makes. And now it is six hours and 23 minutes. So a decent difference overall, my opinion, the actual difference in quality is going to be very, very small. What they're basically doing here is if you go into Print Settings, you'll see that now the perimeters is up to 60 millimeters per second. That is just the speed that the nozzle is moving around there. So I'm not gonna get too deep into the slow and accurate print settings, essentially, like I mentioned, just go ahead and pick one of the standard profiles. 16. Setting for Fast Printing Pt2: And you're good to go. The main purpose of this lesson here is to talk about the FASB print settings, which we're about to get into right now. So let's just take note and remember, let's say this was between 67 hours to print this logo on kind of slow, more accurate settings. Okay, now things get really interesting. Let's go over how we can really speed up this print. So the first thing that we should know is remember the six to seven our time that it was to print this in quality. Now let's go ahead and let's speed up this print and let's see what we get. So let's change this year to 0.3 draft mode. And then let's go into our print settings down under the layer height, it says 0.3. I go ahead and I make this 0.32, which is indeed the maximum layer height we should ever go with a 0.4 millimeter nozzle. Remember, 80% of your nozzle diameter will be the maximum layer height that you can go. So that's just a good rule of thumb to remember now, comes to perimeters never go below two. It's not worth it. One perimeter will make your print extremely weak. So I always keep that at at least two. Now if I'm really trying to speed this up, if we look at the horizontal shells here, we can see that we have the top and bottom. If we want to speed this up, three layers on the top is probably fine. Let's keep going through here. So now we go over to infill, infill set to 20% and grid personally with something like this, you could get away with between 5, 10% infill. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna make this 8% and grid should be fine. Like I mentioned, the only other one that I use is Guy road or wherever you call it, either that or grid. So that is the one in terms of infill density. I would pretty much never go below seven or 8% because we do need to still make sure that our print is successful. And I'll show you why that's important here. So under skirt and bran, we can leave the one sqrt layer. That's totally fine support materials speed now, speed, this is where we actually make up for that time. So under perimeters I'm gonna actually and make this 90 millimeters per second. And then I'm going to take all of these and I'm going to increase some of these are just my values again, you can experiment if you want. But this is a pretty good templates. So 45 for the small perimeters. Now your external perimeters are really important. This is the outside of your print object. This is what you see visually. So we do like to leave this pretty slow. So instead of 35, I go 40. Now infill, infill set to 85. I actually go and make this 100, which is really fast. So again, this is only used when we want to print something very fast. Here we go. The rest of this, wherever we solid infill, top salt info, we leave that one alone support material. This one. We also leave alone sport material, interface bridges, gap fill the rest of that stuff doesn't make a big difference on our print settings, so we can leave those alone as well. The rest of this stuff, we don't need to touch this as just the advanced settings such as the acceleration. Those are also determined by your actual machine parameters. So don't, don't touch those. Now with these settings, I do want to note now what we have is our nozzle is going to be moving really fast. So the one thing that we do have to do is if we go over to our filament settings, you'll notice that our nozzle temperature is set to the standard PLA of 215 for the first layer and 210 for the other layers. What I like to do is actually make this 220 because we are having that nozzle moves so fast. We just want to make sure that enough plastic can actually flow out so that there is my standard or starting point for fast prints. Now let's actually see how this slices and let us see the print time on that. Here we go. We can slice it and you'll notice we get two hours and 17 minutes, whereas the other one was six to seven hours. So that's a huge, huge improvement, especially if we had to print say, 100 of these. Now, once I slice it, what I'd like to do is go through and just make sure that I feel like there's enough infill and places that it isn't going to affect the quality. So let me show you what I mean. As I come up here. It's gonna be totally fine until we get to basically the top layers. And once we get to the top layers right here, I just need to make sure that there is enough infilled at once the machine actually goes to do those top layers, it will have something to print on. So let me show you if I go up one more layer here, and then I bring this to the side. You'll notice that as our print or as our tool head is moving, it's going to be bridging the gaps you're in-between. And the infill setting, I believe we said eight, this will be totally fine for this print itself. Now, if we set this infill to say 0%, for example, then our tool head, it would have no infill to actually lay down the material on. So it would be bridging this whole gap and that would not work. That's why we can never pretty much do 0% infill because the top layers will be affected. Now, we could probably even get away with three or 4% infill and then increase the number of top layers if we wanted to maintain the kind of visual quality of the object. But this is about as fast as I would be comfortable printing this object at. So that is pretty much it for our slow versus fast print settings. Hopefully this helped again, this is something that you just learn over time as you experiment. Remember if you ever have to print like 500 and something or even 1000, we've done lots of small batch manufacturing. It's usually worth it to print one of them fast and then really fast, and then as fast as you possibly think it will go, then compare the quality of those three items, pick the one that you like, and then use those print settings for batch production because that will save you days and days of time in the long run. So yes, I hope that helps. That's it for this video and I'll see you guys in the next one. 17. Machine Maintenance: Hey guys and welcome to this quick lesson on maintenance, how the keyword there is quick. Okay, one of the best parts about 3D printing and 3D printers in general for manufacturing is that they require very little maintenance. As a mechanical engineer, I've done lots of work on large CNC machines and oh boy, let me tell you we have it so easy when it comes to maintenance and 3D printers. So when it comes down to it, it's really just about being proactive. And what I mean by that is that most of the maintenance is actually taken care of as long as you are frequently checking on your machine now before you start your prints, all you have to do. She's make sure that there's no plastic strands stuck in the gears or the rails or the motors. And always, always make sure that none of the moving cables are getting caught on the frame because that could fray some of the wires. Now as long as you take care of those basic checks before you start your prints, the rest pretty much takes care of itself. So let's go over the regular maintenance number one, Greece. This one's pretty straightforward, but what we have to do is add a light coat of Greece to the machine every once in awhile. I would say probably once a month is perfect depending obviously on how much you print. Now, when it comes to different machines, the location that you're gonna put that Greece is gonna be different, for example, on the Prusa there we do need to grease the rails of the x, y, and z-axis, as well as the z-axis turn screws. Now if you have a different printer, maybe you have, let's say an enter three for example, the only place that you actually need to apply grease is to the z-axis rods that are just behind the z frame there. Now I should also note why do we even add grace? Well, it's generally added to reduce the friction of moving parts. And what that does is it helps improve the longevity of your machine. For example, if there is less friction on the rails, then it requires less work from the motors to actually move the tool head so that there is Greece. Let's talk about number two. So next up for maintenance is belt tension. This one's really easy, but basically you should just be checking to make sure that your belts are always tight, but not too tight. Make sure you can pinch them together. But make sure that when you pinch them together it takes a little bit of effort. Again, it's like a 1 second check before you start your print, just pinch the belts and make sure that they are indeed tight. Now lastly, for maintenance, it's not a bad idea to do a quick test on the tension of the screws and the bolts in your machine. If you think about it, basically what's happening is your machine is constantly vibrating a million times for every single print. And that can actually cause some screws or some bolts to come loose. Now you should really only have to do this once after the first month of printing. But trust me, you guys, it's worth taking an Allen key to some of those screws are some of the bolts and just make sure that they are all tight, especially the ones around the hot end and the nozzle. Because the absolute last thing that we would want is for either the hot end or the nozzle to fall off mid sprint and land on our actual print. And that is honestly pretty much it for maintenance. Let's just keep those machines in good working order and I'll see you guys in the next video. 18. Are Expensive Machines Worth the Cost ? : Hey guys and welcome to this lesson. I wanted to talk quickly about the more expensive printers and what you actually get when you spend that money. Basically, I get a lot of questions like, Hey, if my budget is maybe three to say $10 thousand, what printer do you recommend? I get now Spoiler alert and I know this is not exciting to hear, but I still recommend that for 99% of people that they just get a Prusa machine if you have the budget for IT. Person just has their XL machine coming out, that is going to be an amazing option. But let's still talk about it because I do get this question pretty often. Let's talk about what we realistically get by spending that extra money on a more expensive machine. So for us, I think I probably already talked about this by now in the course, if not, I will later, but we've owned and used all sorts of printers, the most common machines in that kind of three to $10 thousand budget range that we've used would be the Ultimaker series as well as the raised 3D series we've used, own both of those machines. Now, here are the general upgrades as well as the pros and cons that come with those upgrades. And that's the important part is that all those upgrades have pros and they have cons. We can't forget that part, so let's talk about it. Number one is IDEX. Now you get IDEX with a few machines. I'd ec stands for independent dual extrusion. Basically what this is is you have two nozzles that are now printing at the same time and yes, it sounds absolutely amazing in practice we had the rays E2 **** in the shop here for awhile and we also had a giant printer. It was like the size of a fridge and a Costco, 30 thousand bucks. It also had IDEXX and here's what we learned. Fyi, I'm not saying the brand of the $30 thousand printer because we ended up not going with them. Still a great printer brand, but the IDEX wasn't that functional. So like I said, basically I deck sounds great in practice. However, there is one big issue in that is that we have two nozzles or extruder heads that are both attached to the same x-axis. And what happens is that each of those extruder assemblies has a 100 different components in it. And essentially the distance between the nozzle and the print bed is never the exact same for both tool heads. Additionally, if your printer has any or if your print bed has any warping or anything like that, it really magnifies that issue. Hopefully that makes sense. Basically, it was a nightmare to actually get a proper first layer from both of the nozzles at the same time, we can always get a perfect first layer from one nozzle, but then the other would either be too high or too low. So the reliability of it just wasn't good enough for us. Now I'm not saying that every machine is like this, but just do a lot of research into the machine that you're looking at purchasing if you are going with an ibex machine. Frankly, I also would never recommend buying a cheaper one if you think about it for basically the same price as a normal cheaper printer, Some of these companies are just throwing in IDEX there in hopes that you will purchase that. But in reality, they're actually keeping out on some other components of the machine to make up for the ability to put IDEX in that cheap machine, I recommend just sticking with the printers on the gear list and you definitely won't have any issues. So what is the better option versus IDEX? Well, for the price of one of those machines, you can probably just buy two printers and then run them individually. And that will also double or actually half your production time because you'll have two running at the same time just on different printers. And it is worth noting that will also reduce the probability of failure by 50 to 80% if you think about it, if your IDEXX print fails, if even one of the nozzles are one of the prints on one side fails. Essentially they both fail, so you also lose the filament. Now, That's just my thoughts on IDEX. It's not quite reliable. And in the future, if we do get a machine and there's one that I can recommend that is reliable. I will absolutely post an update video here and put it in the fearless for you guys. But for now, I recommend staying away from IDEXX printers. Number two, when you spend more money, you generally get an all metal hot end or at least hot ends. It can heat up to 300 degrees Celsius. And over the reason for this is so that you can print specialty materials again, you just need to know if you're going to be printing those or not. And I think I've already mentioned this too, but 99% of people will probably never touched them. Number three is enclosures. This one's actually really important if you're printing lots of abs or ASA or something like that, this one might be worth the money. You definitely want an enclosure if you're printing in those materials, generally, what happens is your heat bed will heat up to around a 110 degrees Celsius. And if it's in an enclosure that keeps the rest of the print pretty warm as well so that it reduces the shrinkage. This one is frankly, the only thing that I think is worth it in those more expensive machines. However, you can also just by an enclosure for a cheaper machine as well. So that is definitely something to consider. Last thing I should mention is support. Some companies offer tech support if something goes wrong, frankly, support doesn't really do much. You're often left fixing the issue on your own any ways they can just walk you through the problem. But once you gain enough experience or even just a little bit to a medium amount of experience in 3D printing. Generally, you'll see the same problems all the time and you'll already know exactly what went wrong. However, warranty is an important one. If you're spending a couple of thousand dollars on a printer, make sure it has sufficient a warranty. Lastly, again, I think if you have the budget for it, the Prusa XL is your best option unless you have a very specific use case for your 3D printer. And if you do, that's really cool. I would love to hear about it and I think you should post it in the project section of this course that we can see it and discuss it. Because that's great information for everyone. So that's it for this lesson. I hope this helps in case you're being tempted by those more expensive machines. I'll leave it at that and I'll see you guys in the next one. 19. Fire Safety: Hey guys and welcome to this lesson on 3D printing fire safety. Now personally, when I was just starting out, I lost a lot of sleep every time my machines were on and I was out of the house. So in this lesson I'm going to go over some safety tips in ways that I can help to give you a peace of mind that you can trust your 3D printer isn't going to start a fire. So with that being said, there is good news and there is bad news. Let me start with the good news. The good news is, I have probably a cumulative couple of million hours, maybe just a million hours of 3D printing under my belt between all of our machines running for the last five or six years and not once did we even have a close call with a fire. Now that being said, it is still important to take the necessary precautions to reduce the risk. For me, honestly, most of it was just a stressing. I hated that whenever I left the house, it was on my mind that I was just worrying about the 3D printers that we're running in the basement. So like with everything else, I tried pretty much everything until I came up with a system that we use and trust today. Now I should go over, this is the bad news. The bad news is basically that nothing is guaranteed. There is no way to 100% guarantee fire safety. If you do everything that I mentioned this video, there is still that chance that something could go wrong. So that is my disclaimer. But what we can do is absolutely minimize the risk and put in practices, put practices in place that you don't have to worry about it so much now, the millions and millions of printers that are sold every year, in my opinion, I think we would hear a lot more about fire safety. It was if it was truly a common hazards slash occurrence. I'm not saying it's not, but what I'm saying is that we can take precautions to control it and minimize our risks such that at least I felt comfortable with our setup and hopefully you can get there too. So let's talk about how we're going to do it. Everything that I mentioned here is also linked in that gear sheet. This is just my opinion. This is how we do it and this is what I think is the easiest way to do it. I'm going to show you them all right now, actually, before we even go over that first and foremost, the best thing that you guys can do, honestly before you start your print is just to check over your printing machine and make sure that all the basics are covered. So the most important one, just make sure that the wires are out of the way from the print bed and then nothing is getting snagged on the frame of the actual print bed. For example, when your y-axis is moving back and forth, makes sure that the bed, or make sure that the cable that goes to the heat bed, make sure that's not getting caught on the frame and fraying any of the wires. That is the number one most important thing that you can check before every single brand. So after we are confident our machine is good to go. Here are some additional steps that we can take. Number one, I guess this is actually number one and number two is remote monitoring plus a shutdown system. Now, there's a lot of different ways to do this. Some people even go to the extent of re-wiring their printers into shut off, some things like that. I don't think it's really worth date here isn't easy solution that involves two items. Number one is a remote power switch. Okay, I'll put a picture of one on the screen here. There's lots of these. It's simply allows you to cut the power to your machine from your phone. So no matter where you are, you can just press a button on your phone and it shuts off your printer. You simply plug the plug-in there into the wall outlet and then you connect it to Wi-Fi. And now you can just shut your printer off at any time. To go along with that, we need number two, which is a camera now yes, you may have a Raspberry Pi camera, but there is a better solution that is a higher definition and be more reliable for this, I use a Google Nest because it also has audio. So if your printer is doing something funny, you will actually get an alert based on the audio that the camera has picked up. For example, maybe a print fell off, it's behind the bed and the axis keeps bumping into the print. You might get an audio alert and then you can open up your phone and just quickly shut down your printer. The worst-case would be if there was a fire or a smoke, the fire alarm goes off and now you get a notification from Google Nest. You open it up, you use the Wi-Fi switch to shut off your printer. You can see that even the printer behind me here, we only use this printer for demos and it actually has a smoke detector on the side of it. So again, it's just those little extra steps to give a piece of mine. Now, if you want to take this one step even further, I know a lot of people that do this, they put some sort of automatic fire extinguisher above or around their 3D printers. So now if something was to happen, you'd get an alert from your phone because the smoke detector sound would be picked up by the nest Camera. You'd open up your phone. You could go ahead and you could power off your printer. And you'd have a giant automatic fire extinguishers method above it. So for me at least that was good in terms of home safety. I think that is a pretty good setup now, the other thing or at least the only other thing that I could recommend would be maybe just check your insurance policy of your house and make sure that you have make sure that you're insured in case there was an event of a fire. Now the reality is guys, you can never be 100% sure. Fortunately, with the advancements in technology and they're very reliable printers today that you can buy. And the good ways to monitoring them like using the camera and the remote shut-off, the odds are definitely in your favor, so it helps bring some peace of mind. Like I said, I'd millions of hours of printing, not even one close call. So I do think that as long as you take care of your machine, you do the maintenance and you check it before you print you should be good to go. These are additional fire safety steps, so that is it for this video. This is one of those things. Again, I get lots of questions about it. So I wanted to make a full dedicated video to show you guys how you can build a good, reliable system and give you a peace of mind in case you're printing overnight or one-year not home. So that's it for this one. I'll see you guys in the next video. 20. Food Safety: Hey guys and welcome to this lesson. So I get this question a lot, like at least a couple of times per week through YouTube, emails, comments, etc. So I wanted to make this video and this lesson here to address it. Now, obviously the question being, is it possible to print food safe items now before I proceed, and this is just a disclaimer. I am not a lawyer or an expert in food safety. This is not legal advice. This is 100% just my opinion based on my years of experience into 3D printing industry. And as an engineer who has a deep understanding of the 3D printing process, like all questions, the answer is not super straightforward, but I'm gonna give you a straightforward answer in case you are thinking about doing this commercially. So here it is. You cannot reliably print with 100% confidence food safe items with a basic desktop FDM printer. And here is y, and here's my experience with it. This is the important part. So a lot of people like to print things like cookie cutters, food molds, chocolate molds, pouring templates, etc. And the reality is, is it depending where you're located or where you are manufacturing and selling your 3D prints. There are legal guidelines around food and food safety. This is the same reason that you can't just go down the street, open up a restaurant, and start selling food before that place gets inspected and approved by the legislating body that's there. With 3D printing, there is a couple of things to consider while actually a lot, but I'm gonna go over the obvious ones. So Number one is the space between the layer lines of that print. And in general, the print itself is porous, meaning that food and debris can actually get inside of the print, which can break the print down itself and also yields things like bacteria and all sorts of other things that is bad for food safety. Number two is washing. If you print something in PLA and you throw the dishwasher, it's going to come out destroyed and deformed. Now, yes, you can use other materials, but washing them is always a bit of an issue as it tends to either melt or degrade that plastic over time. Number three, even if you buy food safe filament, yes, you can buy FDA approved food safe filament. But you have to ask yourself, is your PTFE tube, your nozzle, your entire hot end in your print bed, etc. Is all of that free of contamination? And the answer is no. There is the three obvious reasons. There's at least ten other reasons that I could go over. But basically, if you're just 3D printing for home or for fun, you want to make a cookie cutter, you're probably going to be fine, especially because you know how to handle and care for it. But I highly, highly recommend that you do not go and open up a store to sell things like 3D printed cookie cutters as there could be legal implications down the line. So that is just my $0.02. Again, this is not legal advice. You can take this with a grain of salt, but based on my experience, this is what I recommend to you if you're taking this course now, there are specific 3D printers out there. They actually 3D print food like chocolate. However, let me tell you a story. I had a big project lined up a couple of years ago to 3D print chocolate. I actually tried to get one of those machines here in Canada and the company could not legally sell it to me because their machine did not meet the food safety requirements to be sold in Canada. Therefore, honestly, neither does your desktop printer. Now, this might have changed by now, haven't looked into it in a while. Maybe there is a company that's doing it successfully. But the moral of the story is it's a very complicated process and it's important to be aware of these kind of restrictions around what your printer can and cannot do. I will point out there is a way to do this. There's a much better way and that is basically you can design whatever you want. Let's say it's a cookie cutter, 3D printed, 3D printed as a prototype, test it, and then contact a local machine shots and make that item in something like a food safe metal. Alternatively, you can 3D print something and then actually make a mold of that in a food safe material, which we've done a lot. Let me show you an example of another project we did. We needed to make an advertisement for 3D printing chocolate molds. So I made a giant chocolate Pokemon basically just to show that it can be done. And I'm going to put some clips of that video in here. Now, this was all done using what's called a vacuum form. What I'll do is at the end of this video, I'll put a link so that you can see the whole video on 3D printing that chocolate, Pokemon, basically guys, all in all frankly, is there a market for the commercial use of 3D printed food molds? Absolutely, but there are also a lot better markets out there. So if this was your big idea and you're just getting started, trust me, there are greater opportunities available to you or if you really want to jump in, Do consider using 3D printing as steps one of two, where that step two is to use the actual food safe part via vacuum forming or sending your files to a machine shop so that they can ensure the safety of those parts. Again, if this is just for personal use, obviously do whatever you want. I'm not going to tell you what to do. Maybe you want to make some fun birthday cookies or something like that. You are probably fine to print them, wash them, and then I would say use them honestly, then I would throw them out. So yes, that there there is food safe filament, but using it does not mean that the product you've made is food safe. I hope this helps. Trust me, I did at least 30 hours of research awhile back because we were considering taking on that big project. We're going to work with a bunch of high-end chefs making fancy food items. And honestly it just didn't work out because the logistics of it around food safety, like I said, it is possible if you're only using 3D printing for steps one of two, but you cannot just print a food safe item and consider it 100% food safe. Okay. I think I nailed the point across. That's enough for this one. Do you want to check out the full video on the chocolate Pokemon mode that I made. Maybe that will spark some ideas for you. I'll put a link on the screen to my YouTube channel and you guys can check that out. Moving on, I'll see you guys in the next video. 21. Sell your 3d prints: Hey guys and welcome to this lesson. This one is exciting. In this lesson, I'm actually going to go over how you can design and sell your prints if that's something that you're interested in doing now, if you watch the intro, you know that that's exactly how I get started. So if that's something you're interested in doing, I'm gonna make these two quick videos here, just talking a little bit about the process involved in that. If you just want to print for fun and you're not interested in selling any prints or doing any commercial work with the new skills that you're about to learn, then you can go ahead and just skip the next two videos or stick around and just pay attention because it might be something that peaks your interest. So basically there are two ways to go about it. Number one is it you do the design and the printing, and then you sell that physical object. Now obviously there is a lot to that and that is a totally separate course which I've already made. And you do have access to the best place to get started is with a program called Fusion 360. That's the easiest way to learn how to design your items. And then what I recommend is list your items per sale on Etsy. All of this is completely free to get started, including the courses that I just mentioned and I go over it in great depth. So if that's something that you're interested in, which is designing and selling your prints. I highly, highly recommend checking out those two courses. My company, we have a bunch of Etsy shops. They sell basic 3D prints and they do quite well. I go over all the behind the scenes in the ETC course as well as on my YouTube channel. I will put the link below in case you do want those additional resources. Now, the second way to do it is to 3D print and then sell prints of an existing file. Basically, you can make an ad anywhere like Facebook, a GG, Craigslist, etc. And you can just advertise your 3D printing services. So if someone finds a file from Thingiverse or something like that and they want you to print it. You simply just charge for that service. Again, I have lots of free videos about that on my YouTube channel that I will put below. With the second method, there is something we need to keep in mind and that is the legalities of it. Remember, you are using someone else's property. So there is legalities involved with printing and selling someone else's files, for example, on Thingiverse or our licenses attributed to each file. I'll show you a screenshot of that here. Now I am not a lawyer, so I'm not going to read it all out for you or try and give you legal advice. Just click on those, read them for yourself. It is pretty straightforward and if you're ever in doubt, my number one rule is just contact the person who's actually made those files and ask them if you can sell them. It's easy as that. We make files all the time as a file author. Whenever we post a file for sale on every website, there's a specific license section that we have to fill out before we make those files actually public. The whole system is pretty straightforward. You just have to go and read that for yourself. All of the file creators know whether or not they've already given the public permission to sell them. So like I said, sometimes the best thing to do is just ask. Lastly, on Kickstarter, for example, you'll see that you can actually purchase commercial licenses to print in cell files. You'll see it under almost every single campaign if you want to sell 3D prints of the files, just purchased the commercial license and you're good to go. I hope that helps. I know it's a lot. Again, it's one of those things that you just have to go through and learn. I've if I had to go through and do it all myself too, but fortunately, I did document how to do it in all of my courses as well as on the YouTube channel. So I do also just want to say 1 second, say if this course is helping you out and please do consider leaving a review as that enables me to keep making all of this content here available for you guys. I can't stress it enough to reviews mean the world to me as well as to the platforms that I posted this course on. So I'll see you guys in the next video. 22. Final Thoughts: Hey guys and welcome to this video. Now this is just a quick bit of final thoughts before we actually conclude. So first of all, I will be continuously adding videos to this course as I see fit now I should also note that depending when you start this course, there may still be a couple of videos uploading or being uploaded shortly. Now I will also occasionally be adding videos at the very end of this course, just showing some of the fun 3D printing projects that we do here, like the BB8 robot that I showed you previously. Just a good example of something that's more for entertainment, maybe a little bit of inspiration, but it also do shows us the potential of 3D printing. And maybe, hey, maybe it gives you some project. India's now for more 3D printing and business step. I do have a YouTube channel that I posted videos on fairly regularly. If you want, you can go check that out at youtube.com slash Austin Hartley, and you'll find me there. I'll put the link here. Again. Obviously all of that information is just free content for you guys. Additionally, if there are subjects that you recommend that you want me to add to this course right here in video form, please do shoot me an email at Austin at CRIDE 3D.com and then the title of that email, please put Skillshare 3D printing exactly like this. And that way it will basically just filter it into my recommended inbox. Now, I do read every single one of those. I might not reply right away, but I promise a promise I read and consider every single recommendation because if you have a recommendation, it's likely that someone else has the same one. Now, lastly, this is a little bit of an ASP, but if you enjoyed this course and you learn some things, hopefully some things that will save you copious amounts of time and even money. Please do consider leaving a review here, right on skillshare. That's basically the only way that I can keep giving all of this information out for free. We mean the world to me. If you could just take 1 second, go leave a quick review of this course or if there's anything from this course that was less than five stars, shoot me an email, let me know and that way I can improve this course. So thank you guys so, so much for taking it. In the next video, I'll go over the conclusion. 23. Conclusion: Hey you guys, and we made it this year is the concluding video. So thank you so much for watching this course. I hope it helped you a ton. Like I said, I did my best to pack almost a decade of experience into this short course. And hopefully what it does is provide you with a fast-track to successful 3D printing. In this course, we went over basically everything for unboxing or printer all the way to using advanced materials and advanced print settings, guys, honestly, I had a ton of fun making this course and I hope that you guys also enjoyed the lessons. There are two last things I want to mention. The first of which is that if you're interested in learning how to design things for yourself so that you can 3D print things that you're thinking of. I have a course on learning Fusion 360. The software is free, the course is totally free, everything is there. That course is also up on Skillshare, so be sure to check that out. Additionally, if you're interested in setting up an Etsy store to go with your 3D printing. I also have a Skillshare course on that for you guys to see. Again, everything is 100% free. It's all hosted here on Skillshare. That is it for this entire course. I hope to see you guys in the future and happy printing. 24. Case Study 1: Hey guys and welcome to this lesson. Now, like I mentioned, what I'm gonna do periodically is just showing you some updates and some fun things that we have been making. Everything that I'm about to show you, we design here infusion 360 3D printed here, and we actually also sell it on our Etsy shop. Now the one thing all of those have in common is that U2 can learn how to do any of those if you're interested, all those courses 100% free, taught by me on my Skillshare profile. So if you're interested, check that one out. But let's talk 3D printing because 3D printing is the best. First thing that we have made and 3D printed is this here looks like it's on the board. It actually goes on the board, but this one I just left there so I could show you this was obviously 3D printed in TPU. Now you might be wondering, what is this? Is it just for show? Actually first, we should probably talk about this. What is this? This is an electric skateboard. It's called a one. We'll basically you just put your feet on like this and then it goes, if you haven't seen one before, they are pretty cool, I recommend checking them out. There also a lot of fun to ride, but what we do is we designed and we 3D print and then we sell accessories for them. So this is just a really good example of some Ren protectors that we make in case of board rolls over, you don't want the REM getting dented by rocks and stuff like that. So this is just a simple rim protector designed in Fusion 360 and then 3D printed. Next up we have this right here. I call these fender kickers. You can call them whenever you want. They basically attach to the board like this. That way when you're writing your feet are here and if you want to do any tricks or kinda jump with the board, you can see that the profile there is shaped such that it will catch your feet when you jump. Now this here is also print in TPU. It's printed at about a thirty-five percent infill, so it is quite solid. That is a second example of something super practical that we make for this board. Now, let's talk about the third thing, probably one of the most important, hopefully you can see it on the camera there. This right here is just a little TPU plug, again, designing Fusion 360 3D printed here. And it goes actually in the charger point of the board. You're not gonna be able to see this super well. But I will just show you here for a second. You can see that it goes in that hole. That hole there is where the outlet actually plugs into the board to charge it. So that just keeps it kind of dust and waterproof while you're riding. That there are three great examples of practical things that we 3D print here. And then if you're interested in learning how to design, I have that fusion course. If you're interested in learning how to actually sell your items. I also have the ETC course, so that's it for this update. It I just wanted to show you guys a couple of things that we've been working on and then we have actually just launched. So see you guys in the next one.