3D Printing - An Easier Go at it This Time Around...

I jumped into 3D printing a few years ago, played with it for a few weeks, then gave up as the setup and process was fraught with challenges that made it more frustrating than fun, and I kind of ran out of things to 3D print.

BUT a few months ago (and as a thing to fiddle with over the summer break), we ended up getting a new setup and most certainly the technology has improved and all of the struggles we had before seem to have been worked out. We're now easily 100+ prints in with 100% success rate, no errors or failures, so I'd say this has been a success.

(note: I am NOT making an endorsement for this brand/printer (and definitely not getting paid for writing this article), just simply sharing our experiences...)

The Make / Model of 3D Print We're Using

The first go around (during Covid lockdowns) we got an Ender 3 3D printer which started at about $350 and by the time we added on a bunch of fancy add-ons (lights, camera, bed leveler, etc, etc) we were probably into it at about $700-$800. It was the state-of-the-art hobbyist printer at the time with a lot of 3rd party modifications available, etc.

This time we got a Bambu Labs X1 Carbon printer that cost $1200 and at that price came with everything we needed (except for the plastic filament stuff to print things with). Bambu Labs has a lower priced "similar but barebones" A1 model at about $400, but we popped for the more expensive model, and I'm glad we did.

The big thing about the more expensive X1 Carbon model that we got is it has a full enclosure, lidar camera to confirm the print is working before it zips along to at high speed, has a touch screen, etc, etc. It's actually all the stuff we had added on to the Ender 3 printer we had bought a few years back, however rather than putting in all the "mods" to the base printer ourselves, this X1 Carbon has it all built in, and thus the minute we got it out of the box, setup, and plugged in (in about 30-minutes), it just worked! We didn't have to tinker with heat settings, filament configurations, weird 3rd party hacks, etc.

What Makes a Good 3D Printer and a Good Printing Experience

Like with most things, you just want it to work. And in the 3D printing world, you want to send a print file to the printer and just want it to come out as a 3D print in 10, 100, 1000 minutes later.

The complexity of 3D printing is you're dealing with a plastic that has to be heated at a specific temperature to spit out of the nozzle, that sticks to a plate that the thing prints on (where the plate can't be too cold, otherwise the plastic hardens too quickly before the next row is layered on top to stick together; and not too hot where the plastic droops when layers are placed on top). And if you get it completely wrong, you can be 2 hours into your print and the project decides to come unstuck from the printing plate yet the printer keeps "printing" spewing out gobs and gobs of plastic creating a very pretty nest, but not the project you were hoping for.

Also tricky is when you change from plastics to things like carbon fiber (thus the name of this printer, the X1 Carbon), it'll print other types of stuff (extremely durable) prints. But carbon fiber requires everything to be at a different temperature than plastics, where a "do it yourself" 3D printer requires you to program in each of the temperature, plate, and cooling settings where this X1 Carbon printer has RF sensors that when you put one of their filament rolls on the printer, it senses the type of filament you have (PLA plastic, PETG plastic, carbon fiber, etc) and auto-adjusts everything for you.

So this printer includes a bunch of fancy bells and whistles that seems to ensure you just send a print job and it figures out the rest

What to 3D Print

Well, as I started this article I mentioned that the first time we fiddled with 3D printing we stopped after a while because the thing didn't reliably work, but also we were kind of out of things to print. And here we are, a few months later with this new printer and we're kind of just printing pretty random stuff, but all various experiments.

Like we printed this Star Wars thing that had a bunch of strands on it, looks really cool, wanted to see how it printed.

We got carbon fiber filament and gave that a try, really exciting to be doing something in carbon fiber!

My kids are doing various projects, like our 12 year old is learning shapes (tetrahedrons, dodecahedrons, etc) so he's using an iPad app, creating shapes, and printing them as part of his learning. So that's something that expands a home school learning from just reading about shapes in a book to trying things out and printing them.

We're also using the 3D printer to create cases, stands, modules for our Raspberry Pi electronics projects we're working on, and most recently building out A.I. Internet of Things (IoT) devices. So 3D printing is an extension to electronics, lighting, and other stuff we fiddle with

Wrap-up

So yet another new toy to play with. Definitely a better, not frustrating experience this go around. Is it worth $1200? My wife would say that I'm not as grumpy in printing things to this printer as I was with the cheaper $400 model from years ago, so the $$ went to "not being grumpy" about a bad 3D print experience, so have to say that's a good thing :-)