hi everyone, i’m tom, and today i want totalk about what i think are the five most important things to know about 3d printing# before you get into 3d printing. just so you know what you’re getting yourself into.so let’s get to it! first of all, you can’t print everything. the way 3d printers areoften sold, especially on kickstarter, is with a tag of something like “make anythingyou can imagineâ€, and they’ll show you
why is 3d printing good, pictures of detailed assemblies or parts withembedded electronics or multi-color prints or some other “wow†factor object. thething it, though, with the printers you can buy for a couple hundred bucks, you’ll onlybe printing with plastics, in a single color, with only a single material type per print.you are also limited by what kind of geometry
you can print - and that means you’ll haveto deal with a limited build space, parts that don’t always have the tightest tolerancesand for super-fine details, well, you can’t print them at all. there are printers outthere that do use different processes, which allow you to make multi-material parts, printin metal or with a super-high resolution, but with six-figure price tags, those areprobably too expensive for anyone who isn’t a company that’s running them 24/7 for paidwork. so don’t let those different technologies get mixed up.but i’m not saying that filament-based printers are useless, far from it. with the right models,you can do amazing things with them, which brings me to my next point:learn about modeling. and i’m not talking
about walking up and down a catwalk, i meanactually learning to use the software to design the parts you want to print yourself. of course,you might think, well, there’s these huge content libraries out there where i can justsearch and download ready-made designs, and while they are great for trinkets and decorationand that kind of stuff, you usually won’t find the exact parts you want if you’rerepairing or creating things with your 3d printer. you know, if you only keep printingoff parts that you find online, just to be printing stuff, that’s going to get boringreally quickly, as you’re basically using the 3d printer as toy, because right now,it’s not really a tool that will replace going out and buying stuff any time soon.on the other hand, if you use it as a tool
to transfer your ideas from the virtual intothe physical space, be it for artistic purposes, for education or for engineering, prototypingand making things, then you’re really making good use of a 3d printer. so my advice here:grab one of the free tools - free cad, blender, sculptris, openscad, or even one of the 123donline tools, and figure out how to create the things you eventually want to print beforecommitting to buying a 3d printer. you can even download e.g. ultimaker’s cura anddry-run your parts through the slicing process, which is the very last step before startinga print, and get a feeling for how different desings would be printed.next up, a word on 3d printer selection: most of the stuff that is being sold as “newâ€or “exclusive†on certain printers usually
isn’t. it’s either that someone has alreadytried it and found out that it doesn't work as intended, pirate 3dor it’s simply not new or exclusive. in the hobbyist 3d printer space, things usuallyaren’t exclusive, because it’s all driven by a community of countless individuals andnot by a few companies that take up the entire market. there’s an enormous amount of sharingand collaborating going on under the reprap flag as open source content, and that’sreally the only reason why 3d printing is as big as it is today. and no, makerbot didnot invent 3d printing. that’s why it’s not called “makerbottingâ€!on the topic of makerbots: 3d printing can be pretty frustrating at times. even moreso if you also have to deal with the “smartâ€
extruder on the newer makerbots, but in general,none of today’s 3d printers are devices that are totally service-free and 100% reliable.not even the professional grade printers manage to pull # that off. and i mean, not even your2d inkjet printer manages to pull it off. some printers obviously fare better than othersin that regard, but all of them still require a bit of knowledge about what to do when thingsdon’t go as planned. there’s an enormous amount of resources and knowledge availablenow, much more than what was out there even just two years ago, but it’s still up toyou to learn and apply those things. which i think can be quite interesting on its own,/ i like to learn about how things work, but even if you don’t care about the learningaspect, you still might have to make a fix
or two every now and then. common areas ofheadaches are print bed adhesion, clogged hotends and poor print quality overall orpoor design in the parts you’re printing. none of which are impossible to solve.and lastly, and i absolutely don’t want to paint a grim picture of 3d printing, 3dprinting can be extremely addictive and satisfying and time-consuming once you really get suckedin. i mean, even after five years of 3d printing, # i still get absolutely fascinated when,with two clicks of my mouse, a design that was just a virtual model ten minutes ago isgetting built as a physical part in front of my eyes. that’s something that’s nevergoing to get old - just watching the machine do its thing and thinking about what enormousamount of technology is working together here
is pretty mind-boggling. and while it takesa while to figure out what a 3d printing is good for and what it’s not so good for,once you do have that figured out, it becomes an extremely versatile and enabling tool thatyou can use to create things. / i mean, there is really no other technology for making thesekind of parts that is so flexible # and # cheap at the same time / as a filament-based 3dprinter. i use mine all the time for repairs, for adapting things to exactly what i wantthem to do, for prototyping and creating stuff and for pretty much everything else wherea plastic part will do the job. so that’s it for today, i hope i made afew things a bit clearer for those of you
who are just about getting started. if youliked the video leave a thumbs up, if didn’t
like, leave a thumbs down and tell me in thecomments what i can do better next time also, free free to share it with people youthink might this video useful. and as always, take care everyone, see you next time!
