Sometimes I get stuck in the land of 3D printing. It starts out small with me going downstairs to kick off a print. Prints take hours. For instance, I'm working on a pencil holder for a teacher gift right now. In the end, it will hold a handful of pencils or other writing implement-type things. The outer shell is finishing a seven-hour print in a few minutes. The interior will take another five hours. The print will be beautiful when it's completed and will hardly look 3D printed because I'm printing it at a high level of detail that equates to longer print times.
I get stuck because I want to start a print but I need to change to a different filament so I have to wait for the machine to warm up so the filament can melt enough to release from the nozzle. Then the new filament is inserted and run for a bit to purge to the new color.
While I'm doing this I go to the computer and slice the model, make slicer setting changes, and slice a few more times usually until I get the result I'm looking for. If the model will be decorative I want it to have very light layers so it has a delicate look, like in the way a translucent tealight candle holder might look.
In other cases, the piece needs to be structurally sound with many wall and perimeter layers, more filled in in the middle, and thicker layer heights printed each layer. Tonight I've been printing a wedge part my husband designed to fit under a shelf he was going to have a good bit of weight on.
After picking the settings I need, I ask the software to "slice" the model up into lines that the printer will use to have the extruder lay down melted plastic on top of melted plastic, ultimately ending up with something that looks like what you were hoping to make.
In any print, the first layer is the most important. It's the most important an order of magnitude higher than any other layer. Every other layer is built upon the first layer so the first layer sticking to your build plate is paramount. If the plastic doesn't stick, you have a big mess when you come back.
I get stuck because sometimes I wait to see how the first layer is going. Sometimes I have to restart the print, and that takes more time. Sometimes I have to make changes in the slicer and resend the model to the printer. And sometimes I just watch because it's interesting to see.
Today, after verifying multiple times that there were no problems with the print, I left the room. I was printing the shim my husband had designed. He told me he needed me to print something after I'd changed to a nozzle that wasn't going to work well with his needs. I thought I could make it work though.
There was a lot of plastic being laid down at once. A huge amount. I had changed setting to accommodate as best I could his print needs with the new nozzle that was 250% larger than the one he really needed for his model. I had this though. I know a lot now, right? Surely nothing will go wrong. Even though everyone has things happen. It's just the way things go with 3D printing.
I went upstairs to do something in the garage or talk to my husband or get the mail or maybe all three. I was gone for a good while and when I finally came back downstairs I walked into the mechanical room to see the build plate completely missing from the machine. I have no idea how something caused the strongly magnetic build plate to fling a few paces across the floor, but it had happened.
There was filament in strands all down the side of the printer. I hastily stopped the print. This is the model and the spaghetti filament surrounding it. If I hadn't caught it when I did, there could have been five times that much filament in a pile.
The model is the rectangular thing on the left. It looks like there is a second one under the first one. There was a force pushing the model to the side so the layers kept getting offset. The squiggles in the center of the model are what "infill" looks like. In this case, it was 15% of the total center space with a gyroid pattern. Exciting stuff, no?
The Big Boy Update: My son is very insistent that his father and I play The Legend of Zelda: Breadth of the Wild. He really wants us to play it. He's offered up his Switch and is even willing to help us if we have questions. He loved the game very much.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter came home from school and I asked her if she did anything fun today. She said she did, that she used the Dice Dozer in her VI class. The Dice Dozer is a 3D printed model I printed for her teachers. I've been printing a good bit for my daughter's class. It doesn't get old though, hearing that people like the thigns you print.
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