Another note: PLA has gotten significantly better in the past few years. PLA+ is legitimately better while being as easy to print and the Polymaker HT-PLA and HT-PLA-GF are even better as you can meaningfully anneal them after printing to make them strong and temperature resistant enough for some very functional prints.
I personally run all PETG because it is ultimately better material post-print, and once you understand how to print with it, it’s not really much harder to deal with.
The day I discovered that I should just run my dryer with the PETG inside while printing was revolutionary. Of course, that requires you own a dryer that allows the filament to print while it’s inside.
I am getting reasonably consistent prints but they aren't perfect.
The long version of my tips for using PETG are:
- A Bambu Lab printer doesn't hurt since it's so nicely calibrated and idiot-proof
- Clean the build plate with dish soap and dry fully. I haven't found any need for glue stick on a textured plate.
- Using a filament that has a profile available from the manufacturer for Bambu lab printers
- Printing with the filament in the dryer with the dryer running during printing
I can print PLA at 100mm/s with .25mm layers...but PETG I don't go much over 65mm/s give the same line width/layer height.
Since getting things dialed in I switched to primarily printing PETG. Although, I have no issue printing PLA, PETG or ABS when needed.
Better ratio of weight to strength, far more durable parts for most jobs, and acetone smoothening opens up all sorts of doors to incredibly high quality prints without all the labor of sanding.
For functional parts I would not use anything else until there is a really good reason (such as high temperature stability or more strength for a given weight or cross section). I've gone through multiple tons of the stuff now (3500 Kg in total or so) on 85 printers (Bambu's (43), Creality (22) K1s and Prusas (20)), consistency between batches is very good though from brand to brand there can be some notable differences.
If you have stringing and globbing problems with PETG my first guess would be that the filament profile that you are using is subtly off for that particular brand of PETG and/or that the filament wasn't dry.
PETG is just oozier and stickier by default, so stringiness is almost guaranteed to happen, bridging at a greater risk of failure, etc. It is tougher, so unless you have a printer that can use multiple filaments on the same print, removing supports is more difficult.
Can you reduce these factors by tuning your 3D printer - yes, a bit. But that's not "utterly problem free".
PLA is the plug and play of the 3D printing world right now.
Incidentally, a lot of the stuff on thingiverse and other similar sites suffers from those kind of issues. They are tuned for PLA on a particular printer without realizing it.
Also due to lower nozzle and bed temperatures, prints start faster so you can check the first layer sooner before you let the printer do its thing.
One thing I've started playing with now are gridfinity cases so I can pick a bunch of part boxes out of my drawers, put them in the case and take them to the garage without risk of everything falling out. Then, when I'm done, they go back in the drawer.
And in that sense it means that almost every design made by someone else you find will fit your machine. I rarely if ever find something on Printables or Makerworld that requires a larger machine than the A1.
Then you’ve got the A1 mini being ao popular that many times people will make variants just for the small plate on that machine.
In the garage, I have one that I can slap down anywhere, with a couple boxes that I can load for the screws, nails, washers, nuts, and bolts, etc... used in my current project.
Having the grid makes the boxes sit firmly in place.
These are the types of things I want to print. My Ender 3 was so finicky, I only got a few out before I gave up.
The kind of problems that could only be solved with a rather embarrasing amount of tuning every time I switched filament types or speeds or the temperature in my garage changed etc etc etc. Things that basically meant that every time I wanted to introduce any change I needed to print a new flow tower, new bridging tower, new temperature tower, the bed levelling took a huge amount of effort to install BL touch on it but it still worked....when it wanted to, with parts of the first layer being too close scraping the bed and others being far enough to not stick.
Don't get me wrong - the Ender 5 could print as well as the H2D can, absolutely. But it would need 10 test prints and me pulling my hair out first to get to the same level of quality - which I have done, repeatedly, but I just lost the appetite for the tinkering. With the H2D I click print and the machine calibrates itself so well I actually feel bad for anyone who only ever experienced this and never had to sit down calibrating extruder steps or flow rates manually. (yes, old man yelling at clouds).
>>and I don't send a single bit of information to the Creality mothership while doing so. The same is probably harder - but maybe not impossible, I haven't looked into this yet - with Bambu printers?
Bambu printers, even with the most recent firmware allow Home Assist integration where you can monitor all print parameters remotely. But to be completely honest with you - I did go through a phase where I cared about stuff like this, now I just want it to work and be more like my dishwasher than like my bike, I want to tinker with the bike but my 3D printer should "just" work.
Having said that I must say that the firmware update did make quite a bit of difference. I have yet to print out any of those flow/bridging/temperature towers, I did get a few bad starts related to bed adhesion but those are 'common 3D printer problems' not related to the machine. Using some of my daughters' hair spray solved that for the most.
It can be multiple hours between prints because good prints take time. But you can spend 30 minutes browsing random peoples designs online and say "cool" and press download on 20 different designs that you only print 1 or 2 of ultimately.
Also some designs look cool but the second you load your model up in a slicer you can see it is too finnicky or too long or expensive to print to be worth the effort.
It can be composted in industrial composters, but even if you dont do that it's still pretty green
Let's see how much you really care: https://all3dp.com/2/best-diy-filament-extruder-kit-maker/
Let’s take 1kg of filament, which is enough for multiple print projects depending on the size of the items.
That is approximately the same weight of petrochemical material as 1/3 of a gallon of gas (making a bit of an assumption that the amount of processing per weight of both materials is roughly the same).
Every time you drive 10 miles in a car that gets 30mpg it’s like you are burning an entire roll of filament.
So the average American is using probably 1-4 rolls of filament just to get to work and back. The last time I bought a roll of filament was multiple months ago.
I’m not singling you out, I am really just pointing out that humans are terrible at understanding the quantities of things and what things actually use a lot of material and create a lot of carbon emissions.
This is especially true since cost is so detached from material use, waste, and carbon emissions.
A gallon of gas is an order of magnitude cheaper than the equivalent weight of filament.
Burning a bunch of BTUs of natural gas to make my house 4 degrees warmer and gain a trivial amount of additional comfort wastes a whole bunch of energy but costs me so little that I don’t even know what my gas bill is.
It’s cheaper for me to replace most of my home appliances with brand new ones than hire a repair service.
I can fly to Florida for $50 and burn 15 gallons of jet fuel.
If I put more garbage out in my bin I’m not charged more. I can even put furniture and appliances out there and I am not charged more.
These are all examples of waste and environmental impact where I don’t really see or feel the magnitude of them because our systems don’t show them.
Anyway I know this is kind of a huge tangent of a discussion. But really, 3D printing is the least of your worries.
Being able to design, print, test, change, print again really made the potential of 3D printing shine for me. I must have went through a couple dozen iterations as the hardware choices solidified and I saw what worked and what didn't (like "oh, I actually can't reach that screw once these two pieces are put together"). It was a really rewarding experience and I'm looking forward to the next project.
If you have never designed physical objects before it is really challenging at first. The learning curve is pretty steep and, at least in my case, I discovered that I didn't have a mental language for thinking about functional 3D and mechanical design. You also start to look more closely at the objects around you and think about what went into designing them.
I started doing 3D design about a decade ago, when I got my first 3D printer. At first using free modeling in CAD and then later learning how to do constraint based and parametric designs in Fusion 360. This felt slow and perhaps limiting at first, but when you get used to it, it will save you a lot of time later and allow you to make more useful designs that are much easier to evolve and vary.
I think it took something like 4-5 years before I printed something someone else had designed. Mostly because I used 3D printing to make custom parts for my own projects, but also in an effort to force myself to learn. I know the learning curve was steep, but for some reason I have forgotten how much work it was to learn.
Now there are so many useful designs, designed by people who are a lot better than me available everywhere that I do print a lot of things others have designed. But I think learning to design things yourself is a really good opportunity to learn useful skills.
For instance, I had never anticipated that I, a software engineer, would get paid, by an actual customer, to design parts for their projects. Or even consult on physical design for someone doing product development. I am by no means at the level where I'd put it front and center on a resume, but I can design, and to some degree, manufacture simple mechanical parts.
(Along with 3D printing I've been doing some CNC at a very hobbyist level. I would still say I am very much a beginner when it comes to machining metals, but it is really fun to see that you can make reasonably precise metal parts for real applications (car parts) at home in my garage with not that much effort. This weekend I'll be doing thread milling in aluminum for the first time on a part that requires M3 screws)
Last year I printed a peg leg for a nonstandard luggage wheel that broke off my suitcase and Samsonite won't sent a replacement for, a cleanable coil denitrifier for a saltwater aquarium, custom shadowbox drawer organizers for a toolbox, and during an aquarium emergency printed a metric to US pipe bushing.
I also put the skills to use for woodworking modeling a set of couch doggie stairs and a couple years ago designing the building for my observatory.
It's a really really useful skill
Deltahedra has extremely impressive tutorials on YouTube. No fluff -- no long intros or filler -- 30-60 minutes of dense content, clearly explained: https://www.youtube.com/@deltahedra3D
It's a really good feeling to be able to put something together that solves your problem. As I asked my wife, "Is this why people with wood shops are always so smug?"
It's also fun to be able to feel your skills building. I now have opinions on friction fit box lids.
I can express myself well spatially in code, but that doesn't help much in CAD where you have to figure out what combination of buttons and parameters will do what I want.
I can manage dependencies well in code, but that doesn't help much in CAD. I continually struggle to design parts with geometry that is dependent on the spatial relationships and constraints of how multiple parts connect together.
has allowed me to extend it to do things which would be quite difficult in other tools:
1. 3D Model code generation
- generate the model via AI, using plain text - review the result (using FreeCad for visual feedback) - iterate until the model is fine - tell the AI which parameters shall be customizable
(see my tablet holder example, there I have parametes for a Huawei MediaPad and also for an old Samsung Galaxy Tab, both using the same model)
2. 3D Model export
This can be done entirely headless and it's very robust. No AI involved, only the python code previously generated by AI.
Currently a generic 3mf file is exported, so It needs to go though a slicer and you need to apply your printer's settings (printer type, nozzle type, all that stuff).
But the generated 3mf is just a ZIP with 3d model and the settings within. So this could also easily be automated.
Blender is overwhelming at first glance, but it becomes incredibly intuitive once the UI clicks. Of course modelling for printing in Blender has drawbacks and limitations. It's more fiddly, but unless you are super stupid, you can get pretty far, pretty quickly. And you can do sculpting and organic shapes, which are hard/impossible in CAD. Learning Blender basics is worth it anyway, incredibly useful for thinking and sketching in 3D. Oh, and it's FOSS, runs entirely locally, doesn't spy on you, or appropriates your creations like the "free" Fusion360 and their forced cloud crap.
Once you got annoyed by Blender's limitations for 3D printing, you can learn CAD. But Blender is the best way to get into it IMO. Trust me, you won't regret learning Blender basics, in any case. It's expanding your creative horizon and is fantastic, very pleasant software.
The donut tutorial is .. handwavy relevant to 3D printing.
3D modelling for 3D printing doesn't require materials, colours, lighting, camera placement etc etc. But doing the donut tutorial will get you used to many aspects of blender and realise just how powerful this software is. It's also kind of a Blender right-of-passage.
The Blender documentation is fantastic if you prefer to learn via pages than random video-build-a-thing tutorials.
Blender tends towards using keyboard shortcuts. Learning them can greatly speed things up.
And Blender has a large body of community forums for questions and answers if you want to search(first), post a question, or likely ask your friendly AI what the answer is.
[edit] the bite sized blender basics videos on the blender.org site no longer easy to find. :-(
But.
The thing is that Blender and Fusion do not even exist in the same universe. If your goal is to make mechanical parts it doesn't help you to learn something that is only good at creating meshes. Just as there is little point to learning Fusion if you want to create 3D characters for, for instance, animation.
Everyone tends to start by making shapes, but if you are making 3d printed mechanical parts you soon realize you have to graduate to learning how to do CAD in general. If you are making mechanical parts you tend to deal with precise geometry and geometric relationships. It is usually 2D geometry that drives most of the design. CAD models are often also parametrized so that you can change dimensions, angles, multiples of features etc.
But a heck of a lot of what I print doesn't exist, or only exists in disparate parts. So I am forced to RAD a lot of stuff together.
Prusament PC Blend is insanely strong and stiff, I saw a 3mm PC bracket bending a high quality metal wood screw into an S-shape without breaking. PC-CF is much easier to print, looks great, and is stiffer still, even if a bit less strong. ASA looks great and is tougher than PC. Both creep less than PLA and PETG. Both shrug off 100C under load.
This review [1] cites the absolute highest amount of emitted styrene in the studies they are reviewing to be 113 μg/min. Using [2] for simplicity with styrene's molar mass (104.15 g/mol), we get to a printer creating at most 0.024 ppm of styrene per minute per m3 of unchanged air. For comparison, the "work exposure limit (WEL) for styrene is currently 100 parts per million (ppm) averaged over an 8-hour day" [4].
In other words, as long as you have some air exchange in the room, you'd be orders of magnitude away from the safe work exposure limit on styrene.
It also makes sense, considering that it's a microscopic amount of molten plastic, whereas injection moulding factories work with vats of the stuff.
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223102...
[2]: https://teesing.com/en/tools/ppm-mg3-converter
A lot of plastics contain wide assortments of additives to obtain mechanical properties. Outdoor ventilation is absolutely preferable to filtration or smell reduction filters that does practically nothing about carcinogens.
PLA is comparatively low emission, but a slow cooking PTFE tube in many hot-ends is not something people should be around. ymmv =3
People focus too much on smell as the only indicator.
Chopped CF filled FDM filaments are mostly a scam, but there are few PETG and ASA viable options:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7JperqVfXI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7JAOi4JnBs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAL_p0yYKIc (Fibre Seeker 3)
One challenge designing a metal-printing process was making it safe for people without prior lab-safety training. Some 3D additive processes are simply just not practical for careless "yolo" consumers. =3
https://github.com/Brookke/brookke.github.io/blob/main/src/c...
Am I really the only one?
No idea of your "tangency weight" bit though. I use blender bevel tool.
I never really heard this word until I was 18 (in the military) and it's occasionally part of my vocabulary if I, say, drop a sturdy wrench on my foot.
It would be impractical to make in any method than additive printing.
I imagine metal printing will never be something that happens at home.
Never? Never for plastics either. It seems like there's always going to be a lot of cost in shaping these materials through carefully controlled very high temperature environments. On the plastic side of things just the filament you feed to a printer is a multiple of the cost of the plastic feedstock that goes into making the filament.
You can send off models and get them 3d printed in metal today reasonably affordably today, reasonable as in "considering the time and expertise that go into making the model making a one off part like this isn't breaking the bank" not "competes with mass manufacturing on cost".
JKCalhoun•2w ago
As their post makes clear (even to me) there are actually a lot of things out there you can 3D print. Something I printed last year (and did not even bother to post) was a center-console "compartment" for a 1995 Mazda Miata I have. I swapped out the trashy aftermarket stereo (a previous owner has installed in the Miata) for one that is close to OEM but then I had an empty "hole" in the center console. So I printed a cubby for it.
I too was like the author. Originally got into 3D printing years ago—found it frustrating. Picking up a Bambu printer a yearish ago made made all the difference in the world for me. Previously I had an Ender and it was, endlessly frustrating (pun intended). The Bambu is so next-level, the software so well integrated and polished, that I finally found that I enjoy, and I am not burdened by, 3D printing.
(The only caveat about the Bambu is that people worry about vendor lock-in. I don't believe Bambu have enshittified that way yet, and people are finding workarounds in case they do, albeit by adding complexity in setting up, printing. The price of the Bambu for someone getting into 3D printing is very attractive.)
[1] https://engineersneedart.com/blog/3dprinting2025/3dprinting2...
KeplerBoy•2w ago
Knowing you can design a simple part in a few minutes and actually print it immediately afterwards is important. Before I got a reliable printer (bambulab a1) i put off even the smallest projects because I knew it would entail a multi-hour trial and error session with the printer.
jacquesm•2w ago
the__alchemist•2w ago
jagermo•2w ago