FlyingMonkey's 3D Printing Lessons Learned. Share your tips and advice here.

[FlyingMonkey]

Well, I finally did it, I bought a 3D printer.

I decided to purchase one of the Hyperion Forge 3D printers from the Flite Test store.

https://store.flitetest.com/forge-3d-personal-desktop-3d-printer-us-plug/


I was curious about what these things were, how easy, or challenging they would be to use, and would I actually find it useful.

So, I'd like to post my failures and successes here with you guys, and hopefully share what I've learned. Also, if . you have suggestions from your own hard fought lessons, please feel free to post them here as well.



First impressions... The packaging was good, very good. The shippers did try to damage it, but the printer itself came through unscathed.


The next thing I found, was that it was just as easy to set up, as the guys made it on the episode.

I made my first print, the recommended M3 finger nut. It turned out mostly well. I had the bed too close to the nozzle and the first layer smeared, and sealed the opening on the bottom of the nut.

The next print... I got fishing line. I had adjusted the bed too low.

Bed adjustment I found out, is very critical and you're going to want to check it if not every print, every other print. Scraping the print off the bed will change the adjustments.


More on that next print and what I learned about slicers, on my next post.

 

[rockyboy]

Welcome to the printing madness!

I've found that using a business card as a spacer between the bed and the nozzle gives me just the right height when I'm printing at .2mm layers. I adjust it for just a little bit of resistance sliding the card under the nozzle - if it leaves an imprint in the card it's too low.

 

[cranialrectosis]

Soooo, whatcha gonna print there FM?

Got any plans for things you want/need?

 

[Snarls]

Welcome to the dark side, err I mean FT 3D print community Fred. Prepare to find yourself supporting yet another hobby as your house slowly fills with plastic knick knacks and the sound of printing rings in your ears.

On a more serious note, yes bed leveling and height is important. It's easier and recommended to first just make sure the bed is the same distance (could be just touching, could be 1mm) away from the nozzle at any point (bed 'leveled'), rather than trying to get equal distance and of precisely 0.1/0.2mm at one time. Once the bed is 'leveled' then you start can start dialing in the distance from the bed through the slicer software and not through physical adjustments. There is usually a setting 'z offset' (in slic3r) that allows you to make fine adjustments to what height the print starts.

Finding the best starting height is a bit tricky and frustrating but once you find it you should not have to change it for a few weeks or unless there is a significant ambient temperature change.

 

[jhitesma]

As long as the machine is well designed mechanically you probably won't have to mess with the bed leveling very often once you get it dialed in. Though on mine I found I did still have to adjust it every couple of days and was annoyed enough by it that I quickly got an inductive sensor and started using autoleveling...which was a bit tricky to get setup and working reliably...but once it was working I went over a year without having to think about leveling so was very worth it

One thing that can help with leveling is actually using a tripod mounted bed instead of four corners. Most stock reprap style parts have holes for this already. A lot of people feel intuitively that 4 screws is better than 3...but mechanically 4 is overconstrained and can cause the bed to warp so 3 can actually be more reliable since you only need 3 points to define a plane. I'm not sure if the hyperion has those holes or not.

Also not sure exactly how hyperion mounts their beds. On my Folger 2020 i3 the stock screws/springs were non-optimal and I would wind up with one corner tightened down as far as it could go and one corner so loose the nut would rattle and fall off just to get the bed level Hopefully your hyperion is better than that! That wonky screws/springs on mine were the big reason I'd have to adjust my level more often since removing prints from the bed I could cause things to shift.

There are actually quite a few autoleveling options available now. The bltouch is popular since it mechanically measures the top of the print bed - but it's mechanical and I dislike mechanical things in general. Inductive like I use is nice since there's no contact...but it's designed to detect ferrous metal - I use a few sheets of HD aluminum foil under my glass (and am currently testing an all aluminum print bed) which works but at greatly reduced sensitivity so my sensor which is supposed to have a 8mm sensing distance doesn't actually trigger until more like 3-4mm. The big thing with that setup is I'm not actually measuring the surface of the print bed but rather the aluminum under it - so I have to use an offset and have to assume the glass is flat and even (though the new UBL stuff in Marlin 1.1 gives a way to compensate for that.) There are also capacitive sensors but I don't trust them since things like changes in ambient humidity can affect capacitance, but they do have the benefit of directly measuring the print bed. There are also IR sensors that bounce a light beam off the print surface to measure it, mechanically mounted endstop switches (very similar to bltouch but clunkier...still if you have a spare 5g servo you can re-use your existing z endstop and build one practically for free.)

Even with autoleveling you should still manually level first to get things as close as possible. But it's nice to know that the machine can re-adjust on the fly to small changes (which is the one thing I really don't like about UBL as instead of remeasuring the bed before each print UBL stores a mesh and assumes it will stay consistent between prints.) I should start a thread on UBL since I've been experimenting with it and learning a lot about it's plusses and minuses the past few weeks....

 

[FlyingMonkey]

Hmmmm... autoleveling.... droool.

 

[PsyBorg]

Why did I just picture a monkey in a white coat sitting in a rocking chair petting a cat while drooling and making strange noises...

 

[rockyboy]

Man I wish I had some artistic talent right now.... that's a picture that deserves to be posted

 

[bhursey]

I'm planning on getting an Anet a8 i cant justify 399.... I want to design a pod possibly for a wider FT arrow. I want to print parts of course and one day once I figure it all out print a Cessna 152

https://3dlabprint.com/shop/cessna-152-based-trainersport-plane/