Hey everyone! Has anyone else here gotten into 3D printing? I recently picked up two models in an attempt to give it a go, now that the prices have gotten so incredibly low. My hesitation has always been price and complexity, and it looks like...one of those problems has been fixed.

I now have an Anycubic i3 Mega S for my main printer, and a very inexpensive ($100) model from a company called Labists. I sort of envisioned the smaller one being something my son could start playing with (under extremely close supervision - he's just turned 6), and the other one is dad's printer

Does anyone have tips? I've printed some things out with extremely varying success. The sample print that came with the included card is these two owls that pretty much come out looking good every time I try them. Any time I print something that includes supports, however, things get pretty crappy. The supports end up being very hard to remove. I'm also not sure about the accuracy. I tried this polygonal panther I found on Thingiverse, and stopped it halfway through because the body was looking OK but the tail was a twisted mess of filament. When I popped the half-formed cat off the bed I tried removing the supports that were there so far and found that I couldn't remove a single one.

I get that this isn't exactly like regular printing, and it'll require quite a bit more work, but it's hard to find a really good way to learn the basics. I'm hoping someone here could guide me in the right direction.

That's why I love getting stuff from Shapeways. Someone else worries about the tricky and difficult stuff like that.

I completely understand the desire to do it yourself though. The idea of getting something made in a matter of hours rather than weeks is very tempting.

Matt,
I got some links...I'll PM them to you. I don't have a printer, but I got some good info from a friend.

Thank you! I'll check those out and I'm sure I'll find plenty of good tips.

I got some good information by looking up recommended print settings for my specific printer. I found a page that recommended values and explained the reasoning behind each of them in a way that a newbie like me could understand. Boy oh boy is this not meant for the average consumer yet. You have to really want to make this a hobby.

At the moment, I'm printing out holders for spray paint cans that I can mount in my garage. Naturally, it's something I could easily get on Amazon, but I get to customize it and I didn't see anything quite like it anyway.

So far I've printed out a puzzle that I actually found pretty fun, and a couple other things that didn't turn out great. But I'm getting there.

Another certainty is that if you want a high level of detail, you have to either pay for a REALLY nice machine or you have to wait a LOOOOOONG time.

Lol I'd forgotten about that service. So thanks for the reminder! It's still not out of the question if I have something that I want done really well and is outside my very limited capabilities/knowledge.


It is pretty rad. I printed a couple versions of one item with different print settings to see how much I could tweak it to improve print speed without losing too much quality, and suddenly I realized that for the first time in my life I was prototyping something. That was pretty cool. Of course, it wasn't my design, but there's a few things I'm thinking of creating from scratch.