Singletons.life

I have received my 3D printer and I have plenty to learn still! I purchased a Creality Ender 3 Max Neo.  I’m glad that these printers are robust, could of been the most expensive way to break something for sure.

Start off with setting it up. A manual didn’t come with the purchase, (second hand) thankfully it was available to download the Crality website. Once you saw it, it made so much more sense on how to put it together. Set up in seconds. Obviously it’s not ideal buying second hand for your first printer. Unsure what defects to look for. It was half of the price of buying new. Throw yourself  in the deep end, tend to make things easier later on. I did find that a part was buggered. I had to purchase a part called the PC4. part of the learning process, there are 2 different sizes a PC4-M10 or M6. Someone ordered the wrong one. Don’t go to waste as I’ll explain further on.

Prior to purchasing it, there was confusion between the resin and filament printer. Resin is more for your fine detailed model making like figurines for dungeons and dragons, or dice thrones figures all the niddly bits. Whereas fillament is more for your big models like masks. Like I said before, a buzz light-year suit is the goal!

It’s very strange printing your first model. Unsure what to expect. Best to not watch it start and let the printer do its thing, not too much, as I found out on my second print. I printed an oddish plant pot for my snake plant. Took 50 hours to print. I needed a radius big enough for the pot, but the oddish pot is too deep for my plant pot. Need to find a wee step for it to sit on. Very nerve racking leaving something running in hope it’ll still be printing when you get back. Thankfully, the first print was a success! My thought process at the time, first print was a success, I can just print another one and shoot to bed, boy was I wrong. I woke up in the morning and the printer didn’t sound smooth. Woke up to an absolute mess, hot bed was in tatters, fillament was piling up a load of scribbles on the floor type of mess. Tried clearing as much as I could up, till I turned the printer back on and the fan made a horrible sound. Little did I know, filament all round the nozzle housing, the nozzle sock was melted, even more of a mess I had to deal with. No fear of you plastic waste Nazis! There are plenty of ways to recycle the filament mess. I have stored all the filament waste in a jar, going to colour coordinate it to eventually melt them in a  silicone mold and make models that way also. Realistically, there is no waste!

Creality parts are incredibly affordable, and found something that I wish I had at the beginning, a bastard hot bed spirit level!!! Leveling a bed without a spirit level,  blind leading a blind! leveling a bed without a spirit level, shocked my first print was a success. Ordered more parts off temu. (Surprisingly sales Creality parts.) https://temu.to/m/uent4yltw1n

There is more to it than buying a filament printer. I soon found out that the filament can get brital due to moisture and can affect the prints massively. There are filament dryers rather pricey for the one spool. Plenty of other ways to dry them out on a budget. A lot of people have old kitchen appliances, like a microwave toaster or dehydrator oven and use them to dry it out. Another option is using selica gels to dry them out in a storage box. I managed to find a set up where you can store 9 fillament spools in a 45L crystal box, £5 from ProperJob (shop in Somerset) this is where my PC4-M10 comes into. Use that to feed my fillament from the box to the printer! 100 packets of silica gel packets are £3.90 off ebay. Print some parts to build this box set up. Found the STL file on the thingiverse site. This will be a quick fix for me. Link shows you the goal https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2896547

In all fairness, the research I have done is preparing myself for the worst. I am currently using filament made by Sunlu. A spool has been exposed for some time. Yet to experience a bad print (🤞 touching as much wood as possible) can’t recommend using the filament enough, it’s affordable and really good quality filament.

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  A lot of people buy the gels themselves as you can heat them up to re use them. You can stick them in a container, that sits in the middle of the spools. And have a spool holder in the box. Lots of clever ways of doing this hobby on a budget. I love it!

I am now awaiting the parts to arrive to get my printer up and running. I have found a load of STL files that I am looking forward to printing. Ordering a bundle of filament to give me more colour range. I am now starting to learn how to use fusion 360 to make my own models. There is a channel on YouTube called  Product Design Online. It states learn fusion 360 in 30 days. Today’s lesson was making a Lego brick. Chuffed with it. video tutorials are awesome as he explains and shows every step to the end. I should be a guru on fusion 360 when I next write my post.