84 posts tagged with "3D Printing Tips"

Here at The Spaghetti Detective we are in the unique position where we have watched a lot of 3D prints on a wide variety of different 3D printers. A question we get asked frequently is "what is the best 3D printer?" While generally we try to stay agnostic to the type of printer, and catch print failures on any setup, for this series we wanted to try to provide an unbiased, data driven 3D printer review.

By publishing these statistics we hope to give everyone a better insight into the current state of the 3D printing industry and a look at some statistics of the best 3D printers at scale. The statistics generated below are aggregated from a sample size of over 1,000 unique 3D printers, over 100,000 unique print attempts, and over 10,000,000 hours of 3D print monitoring. If there are other metrics you'd like to see computed on some of the best 3D printers let us know in the comments below and we'll try to include them in future 3D printer reviews.

Best 3D Printer Criteria #1: Popularity​

So you went to sleep with your 3D printer running. Excitedly, you wake up and run to go take a look at your beautiful new creation. To your dismay, something has gone horribly wrong. You've had a failed 3D print. It didn't just create a fresh plate of filament spaghetti, but it has fully encased the hot end of your extruder in a PLA / PETG blob.

We've been there -- the racing heart, the panic, the fear your 3D printer will never run again. While it is possible you've damaged the 3D printer, it's more likely you can get everything back to normal working order by following these steps. The most important part in 3D print clean up is to stay cool and don't rush. Damage is more often caused by frustration and impatience when trying to pull off the cold hardened PLA / PETG blob with force than by the print failure itself.

A hands-on guide to show how to use the paper-method to level the bed for your Ender 3 printer, as well as the tips for the possible problems you may run into.

For any 3D printer that doesn't have auto bed leveling, such as Ender 3, CR-10, CR-10s, Anet A8, precise bed leveling is something that every successful print needs to nail in order to get it right. Bed leveling is literally the foundation (or making sure that the foundation is set up correctly, at least) of a good print. Without a level bed (or software compensation to account for the unlevel bed) your print is often destined for the trash bin, wasting time and money. How much time and money is up to you, because The Spaghetti Detective has got your back!

3D printer users have a long history of fighting bed adhesion problems. That's why we have all these creative solutions: glue stick, glass bed, blue tape, you name it. For starters, we want to give you an overview on what factors play a role in bed adhesion, and how to get them right. We will drill down to each of them in details in the blogs to follow.