Now, it's takeoff time. All of the preparation is complete, you can start the process of fabricating object, time to hit print, time to celebrate the effort that has gone into design, and design preparation, by taking a break and letting the printer handle the heavy lifting for a while. Welcome to the fabricate stage. The printing stage might be the most visible stage of the process. We call it 3D printing not 3D parts done. But I find that operators spend less time mastering the fabricate stage, than they should. Print is a process, not a button. Sure in the best case scenario, this is the least interesting of the stages. But don't count your part before it hatches. As with a real flight, with runway, takeoff climb to cruising altitudes, etc., there are a few elements to keep in mind at various points of printing, that can make a real difference. In addition to watching to see if there is an issue with printing, so that you can interrupt this process, there are also opportunities to intervene, that may interest you, from inserting components partway through printing, to switching materials, to inspecting process, to gain insights into the relative health of your printer. The four key topics of this stage are observe, intervene, part removal, and machine reset. Let's explore a few things you can do during the fabrication process, to ensure your success, and a few opportunities to get more value out of your desktop printer than you expected. Observe. The first fabricate topic is observe. The key subtopics are, watch first layers, and check in on print. Watch those first layers going down. That is the key lesson that you must take away here. For the rest of the print, keep checking in. You're unlikely to watch every bob and weave of the machine, but it is becoming easy with the evolution of electronics, embedded 3D hosts to find more ways to keep up with the progress of a print, than just peering down into the belly of the machine. On your phone, in your browser, and in your even your counter alerts. Stick around for a few minutes after you hit print to watch the first few layers of your job go down. Make sure they complete successfully, because these first layers, can reveal real issues in your print. Watch for bed calibration, adhesion, and material flow. Not only are they easier to see in these early layers, canceling and resetting machine now, will always require less time to produce a successful print, than returning much later to discover an unsuccessful first attempt. You want to know as soon as you can, if there's a problem. Most prints that will fail reveal issues in the first few layers. Keep your eyes out for material not sticking to the plate, not emerging from the nozzle, deposited thinner or thicker, emerging discolored, or burnt looking. It also watch for sharp edges, and corners starting to lift up early in a print. The typical solution, make sure your nozzle is calibrated to your bed, reapply your adhesion strategy, and make sure your material is properly loaded. Again, most important lesson, watch those first few layers. Check in on print. There's a limit to how much you can impact an active print process, but taking care to observe the print in progress, several times over the course of a print, will teach you quite a bit about the effectiveness of your slicer settings. What features does the printer have more or less success producing than others? Are there aspects of the design that fail on the plate right from the get go? What might you want to try next time so that the instructions can be produced much more effortlessly? Compare what you have observed, to the layer simulation in Ultimaker Cura, or other tools, is usually enough to catch that something doesn't match, even if it takes a bit more troubleshooting to discover what is different. While print time estimates are notoriously bad, when the numbers drastically change from the 3D printing slicing software, to the 3D hardware, you have a pretty good idea that something is worth checking twice. Likewise, temperatures speeds while you won't want to watch every second, what you do catch will be helpful to you. Watching now while you are restlessly awaiting your print to be completed, certain factors as far as number of shells, flow rate, density of infill, patterns for support material, will be obvious to you. Now, but completely out of your mind as soon as you get your print in hand, if you follow my advice to always save your print profiles, jot some notes down now, while you observe. What can you learn about the print that you're actually doing right now? These notes might be helpful when you next need to prepare print. Take photos, if you have time to remind you as a current orientation, and its effects on the seam or travel path, that you see now will be lost as soon as the object is removed from the plate. This goes double for taking advantage of the tuning settings, to change factors like, cooling, fan speed, tool head temperatures, retraction, print speed, and flow rate. Great that you can do this, but if you need to make much more use of this change, remember that none of that information is saved in the code for your easy reference, without a little digging. If you expect to improve these job instructions before running this part, or another like it again, you'll want to jot these down, and see if something you tried seems to be enough better for you to regenerate the job file with these updated baked in. Or you can always approach 3D printing like you've never heard of it before, and reinvent all of your settings from scratch, each and every time, biting your nails in fear as you watch to see if the print will succeed or not, this is entirely up to you. Intervene, you need not only be an unbiased observer. You can roll up your sleeves, and intervene. We will cover these subtopics; Pause/interrupt print, and inserts/collaborate. Pause/interrupt print. On many machines, you have the option to halt the machine, either deposit, helpful for making minor adjustments, or to stop it entirely. For most printers, when you pause a job, the tool head will lift out of the way, and moved to an island position. This is useful for utility tasks, such as, swapping materials. How do I pause a print? Typically, you can go to the front of your machine, and use the interface, to select a pause, or an abort option. What tweaks should I consider making while printing? The three most common are, flow rate, temperature tuning, and print speed tuning. Materials swap, while this is technically more of an intervention than an interruption. Materials swapping is so common a need that I group it here with pause strategies. Abort. How do I abort a print? You will always save more time interrupting a print, unlikely to succeed, rather than waiting for that print time to elapse. Resetting to go again. Reprinting at a layer. Inserts/collaborate. While the most common interruptions of a print in progress are to abort and restart, pause and tune, or change filament. To prevent run out of material, there are a number of intentional intervene options, that can help you accomplish more with your machine. Pre-intervention, collaborate with your printer. Part insertion encapsulated fasteners trap components. Intentional material swaps. The most popular option is to intentionally switch materials, either color or type. A handy way to transform a two part design into a single piece. If your sense of timing, and I are well-trained for it, this is the tasks you can essentially execute live on the machine made job. But for the rest of us who don't want to spend all of our time watching machine, plan ahead, and insert posits. Lightning flashes, or buzzer sound, into the G code file to help automate the process. While most common needs are associated with aborting or preventing a failed print. There are a great number of opportunities for creative action, with pre-intervention. Changing filament color or material. Printing the short ends one at a time. Print removal. As printing draws to an end, you can start thinking about how you're going to remove the part. So the two subtopics here are remove from plate, and remove support and scaffold. Remove from plate; as many shot methods as there are for boosting bed adhesion, there are just as many factors, more options for parts removal. While the choice of the removal tool is in the discerning hands of the operator, there are a few critical factors. One; in many machines it is safer and better to remove the plate to gain full access to the part over attempting to remove it by reaching into the machine and just attacking it. Obviously, that doesn't apply to deltas and similar that opt for permanently fixed plates. Two; for many materials, cooling the plates starts the process of popping it off the plate. Some heavy production users actually use a freezer to speed this process up, and some third-party coatings or replacement plates are even more responsive to this strategy. Three; in general your goal is to slide a paint scraper or spatula under the part, far enough for leverage to pop it off the plate. You aren't attempting to cut or chisel it away from the plate and you should aim to work around the bottom edges of the print instead of forcing from one angle with a spatula. While a top print on a cool base can come off without much harm with a mallet, I don't recommend hammers, mallets, and hatchets as a part removal tool set. I'd say this is obvious, but let's say that the Paul Bunyan technique is one I observed nervously frequently out in the field, that and the psycho killer stab. Don't do this, it doesn't work. Four; for PVA support material jobs, and this includes using PVA glue sticks and low-cost hairspray, which is PVA glue, in addition to prints with PVA support material as a secondary printing material. If there are small delicate elements for a part against the plate, you might be better dunking the entire plate in the water to loosen the base layer without twisting or levering up from the base. Five; if you use an adhesion sheet, warm water might lift it off. I tend to use warm water. In a pinch you can also use some isopropyl alcohol to remove the adhesive on the back of the sheet. Six; if you're using breakaway support material, it can help to use some pliers to crush, and pull away non-load- bearing pieces while the part is still on the plate. Pull away parts closer to delicate features more slowly and gently until your hands have a clear sense of the force required to pull it away. The toughest to remove elements can be removed after you take the part of the plate itself, and the thing to try is to adjust the angle of attack such that it requires the least amount of strength to remove the final bits of breakaway support. Seven, and the same rules that applied to any woodworking or sculpture project apply here as well, don't use sharp tools that are too thin. It might buckle or snap from the force you've used. Never use razor blades that are thin, and don't scrape towards yourself with a sharp blade either. How long should I wait before removing a part? What tools are useful for removing a part? Are there other surfaces you can use to remove a part? What can you do if a part is stuck too well onto a plate, and I'll also include remove support and scaffold in this discussion. Machine reset. Now I've seen this 3D printing, scene a thousand times, at the conclusion of the fabricate stage. John has been waiting for 36 hours for his complex and impressive project to finally be completed. The second that it is ready after biting his hand, waiting for the plate to cool sufficiently for him to remove it, he takes this precious piece off the plate. He wraps it carefully in bubble wrap. He places it in his suitcase. He races to the airport. He boards a plane. He flies to another country, not to return for several weeks. Meanwhile, the next person who has patiently waited in line for 36 hours for John's print to be done so that she can produce her very important, very complex part, walks up to the machine, peaks inside, and yelps in surprise. There are bits of plastic everywhere. There's glue on the plate, scraped up in various patches. The nozzle has material on it so she can't tell which one is installed. There is a spool of material in the machine but it is unlabeled. The only person in the world who could put her mind at ease and explain exactly how he configured the machine so that she can efficiently configure it for her use is John on a plane halfway across the Atlantic, perhaps never to return. She doesn't have time to do the work necessary to completely reset the machine. So she misses her deadline. She draws a sad face on a sticky note and puts it on the front of the machine, and no one uses the machine again because no one has the time to troubleshoot what John did with the machine, and all those mysteries. The machine sits lonely in the design studio and people began to stack broken things in it, and on it until it is obscured by trash. Don't be a John, don't make the next person after you have to overhaul the machines simply to use it when another 20 minutes of effort on your part would leave the machine in perfect readiness for the next job. It is your responsibility to leave the machine ready for others. We will return to this topic in another lecture focused on machine post-flight checklist, and machine reset process. So the two main topics here, and we will go over them in detail in a separate lecture, are post-flight check and reset/ready for the next job. A few notes here to prepare you for the lecture that we will explore later. Post-print check. What I'm I looking for in the machine during the post-print check? What should I do if I'm immediately going to print again. Reset/ready for the next job. Why should I reset the machine right after finishing. What should I do if I'm going to print again right away. How do I complete the printing process and perform a machine reset to prepare for the next job. Why do you recommend checking and resetting machine right after use, every time. While the fabricate process doesn't seem to be an area in which you can do a lot after all the machine is doing the heavy lifting, there are still things for you to think about, and if you remember to watch that first layer going down, and be mindful of the various opportunities you have to collaborate with the machine, you're going to have a better experience. Remember, don't be John. Don't leave the machine in a bad shape when you're done. Leave it ready to print for the next person. A topic that we will explore in detail in a separate lecture.
