Emerging Gizmology has a 3D printer now, the Monoprice select mini v2. After 3D printing for a while, you realize that your prints can go wrong in all kinds of ways.
- The space around your printer head can fill with filament and jam up causing the buildup to burn against the printer head and prevent you from printing until you get it UN-jammed.
- Your prints can look like absolute spaghetti. (and possibly jam your printer head)
- The mechanism feeding filament to your printer may fail to feed softer filaments to the head.
- Your prints might fail to adhere to the printer bed resulting in spaghetti.
- Your prints might print fine up until the end and give you spaghetti (and possibly jam your printer head)
- Parts of your print might not print.
- Your 3D printer may become sentient and might even err in ways you’ve never seen before.
To prevent most of these errors from happening to our 3D prints we’ve created a best practices page to reference right before printing.
Be patient- Most 3D printing takes a long time, it’s important to come to terms with that before you print and inevitably fail at least once.
Always know your nozzle head and bed temperature- Printing at the wrong temperature because you assumed the temperature is a quick way to jam your printer head. Check filament temperature before you print online, it will save you time in the long run.
Use raft build plate adhesion- There are many different build plate adhesion types, this is the most resource intensive but, from my experience, it is also the most effective at keeping your prints attached to the bed.
Wipe build plate before a print- Oil from your fingers will prevent your prints from attaching to the plate, microfiber cloths should pick up some of that oil.
Preheat- You can print without preheating, but preheating before a print will help the raft print to the bed.
This is not on the best practices list but it is VITAL to printing with softer materials.
When printing with softer materials like rubber be sure to turn off “Enable retraction”- Enable retraction is great for hard materials like PLA because it prevents uneven threads from being printed.