Are you thinking about owning a 3D Printer and be part of multiple fantastic clubs filled with thousands of awesome 3D printing hobbyists around the world printing really cool things? You are on the right path! 👍🏼
I believe 3D printing is for everyone who are willing to learn new things and express their artistic skills or mechanical prowess in designing 3D objects.
You might be thinking of getting someone a 3D printer as a Christmas, Birthday, or as a surprise gift. 😍 🎁 3D printer is definitely one of the best gifts one can get! Especially when they have the ability to learn how to use one. You must be the best parent, friend, aunt, uncle, grand parent, whoever you are, you are going to be the Coolest Person Ever giving this gift!
Or maybe you got tired of hearing about 3D printing from you friends, coworkers, YouTubers raving about their brand new toy at home that you just feel like you are missing out? FOMO? 😁
Or you might have already ordered one! Congratulations!
Then you start to get a little cold feet and start to question your snap decision so you decided to do more research and preparation… it’s going to be ok! Read on…
No matter which camp you are in, I hope you will find a few useful tips here to prepare for the arrival of your brand new 3D Printer.
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The Big WHY and WHAT?
Back when I first started looking around for my first 3D printer, I had a lot of questions like:
- How much does it cost to buy one?
- What are the features?
- Is it reliable?
- Which brand is the best?
- What should I know before I buy one? etc…etc…
There were so many questions running through my head and it’s tough to find the perfect first 3D printer! Until I narrowed it down to 2 key questions below.
Get ready to write your answers down somewhere handy.
The TWO most important questions you need to answer honestly.
WHY get a 3D printer?
WHAT will it be printing, specifically?
If you do not know the true reason WHY you are getting a 3D printer and WHAT you might be printing, you could set yourself up with a bit of a dissapointment.
If you are yelling, “I don’t even know anything about 3D printing! How would I know what I can do with it?!”
I suggest you read up on this article to get a brief summary of “What is 3D Printing” before coming back to this article.
Question 1: WHY get a 3D printer?
Let’s start by asking yourself WHY do you want/need/considering getting a 3D printer?
Even if you are getting someone a 3D printer as a gift, it’s important to get an idea of what they could do with the printer.
It could be a lot of reasons:
- Adopt a New Hobby,
- Learn a New Skill,
- Print your own replacement parts for things around the house,
- So much ideas you need to turn into real objects you can use,
- Print 3D designs from free and paid websites without paying someone to print it,
- Print PPE ( Yes Covid is still out there!),
- To start a 3D printing business,
- To educate or teaching a class,
- Make Youtube videos, etc etc
You might be thinking, money is no object. You’ll just buy the best one and call it good. Save yourself time…
Well…if splurging $1300 is no issue at all, let’s say you just went ahead and ordered a Prusa i3 MK3S factory built and certified unit. After all, Prusa makes one of the best budget printers in the market. What can go wrong… Right?
Well, what if you or the person enjoys assembling their own 3D printer like the Prusa i3 MK3S Kit? For the price of $749 (excluding shipping), you can almost buy 2 of these kits! Twice the Fun!
What if the buying the “Best” printer is just too small for what you need to print? Wouldn’t that be a waste of $1300?
Question 2. WHAT will it be printing, specifically?
What if they are starting college either in engineering or design or architecture school and would benefit from having a 3D printer that can print large models that are much larger than the Prusa i3 MK3S can print in one setting?
Or multi-materials or multi-colored prints?
Or do they need to create tiny ultra precision models for their studies or hobbies?
That’s a whole different category of printers to consider.
You start to get the idea. There are a lot of different types of 3D printers that fit different needs out there these days.
So knowing a little more about WHY you or someone is going to do with a 3D printer will greatly help selecting a 3D printer that could make the first experience much better one.
It is a significant purchase or gift. The last thing you or the person receiving the gift want to do is to try selling it on eBay or Facebook Marketplace at a loss just so you or they can buy a better suited 3D printer.
So give it some brain juice.
As for me, when I got my first 3D printer, I just wanted to dip my toes in the water to learn how a 3D printer works and the pain points. After that, I might consider paying more money for in a better and larger printer.
I also wanted to learn the basics from the ground up to as a new skill that I can put under my belt.
Learn something new that could potentially advance my career or at least in the know how to talk about 3D printing at work.
I did not have to print anything for work or even have anything specific that I wanted to print for fun. I was too busy working at that time to think of things I can print.
For these reasons, I selected the cheapest 3D printer kit I could buy from Amazon at that time.
It cost me $319! (By the way, I DO NOT recommend this particular kit to anyone today)
For the price, I learnt more than I initially expected. Well worth the $319 even though the print quality that I get from this printer is really not great.
I wasn’t too disappointed with the print quality because my whole reason for getting it is to learn how to build it as a kit and the most affordable one I can find. Print volume did not matter much either.
Needless to say, I got my money’s worth out of the printer in terms of knowledge.
As you read through this article, start thinking about your WHY and WHAT.
Print Volume
Another small detail that you might overlook or just have no idea what it might be right this moment is the print volume or how big of a print you might end up needing to print.
What is the size of a print volume?
It is simply the size of the Printable Area on a print platform or also referenced as print bed size, Width x Depth. Take this printable Area then multiply by the maximum Height the printer can print up to will give you Printable Volume.
The product of these 3 printable measurements Printable Area (Width x Depth) x Height is what we refer to as Print Volume.
Now, most people are more concerned about the Print Area because most 3D printers can print taller in height than it can in Width or Depth. Plus, most objects you might end up printing requires a wider print area.
One of the exceptions being the Prusa i3 MK3S which prints widest at 250mm (~9.84in) vs 210mm (~8.26in) in height. It’s probably also why this is a very popular printer with just slightly wider print area than most similarly sized printers.
As mentioned above, the importance of considering both WHY and WHAT you intended to print affects your decision of what size Print Volume or Print Area in a 3D printer you might need.
This printable Area or Volume cannot be upgraded easily on a printer as it involves almost rebuilding or redesigning the printer entirely. So it’s important to do some research of what you might print.
As an alternative, you can learn some CAD to make an object that is larger than the allowable print Volume into sections and print each section at a time. There are ways that you can learn how to print in sections and assemble all the parts to make one impressive print. Especially if you spend the time to add some finishing touches, no one would be able to guess how exactly you printed it.
If you are really unsure, I suggest using the Prusa i3 MK3S print Volume as a starting reference. Start looking at some of the things you might be interested in printing or try to figure out how large of a print would the lucky recipient of your gift might need.
Expectations
Let’s step away from minor details of 3D printers. Let’s talk about setting your expectations right when you finally get to do your first prints.
My advice is to NEVER compare a 3D printer’s performance and price with your inkjet or laser printer. Printing on a piece of paper with some color pigments with no depth has a totally unfair advantage over 3D printing. Plus regular paper printers have been developed and optimized to be cheap, to perform very fast and reliably in decades of R&D.
3D printers for consumers, on the other hand, had just started to be popular a few years ago which are mostly designed and created by new companies and startups which can be split into different groups.
A group of companies are focused on developing their software and operating systems that provides the best possible user experience for a limited range of 3D printers. They not only incorporate additional sensors, improve build quality, and implement new features but also optimize their proprietary software to these sensors and features that will result in a high rate of successful prints. Their products are also priced accordingly to reflect the quality and care of their product and superior customer service.
One of such companies is called Prusa3D.com. You can read about my Experiences with Prusa i3 MK3, MK3S, and MK3S with MMU2S.
The second group of brands that are building lower priced 3D printers that are very functional but lacking in the user experience and customer service areas. They seem to put their focus on selling 3D printers at lower prices and introducing more variety of models instead of focusing on developing one or two great printers that are reliable with great software that leads to better user experiences.
You can read about the differences of these two groups of brands that I have experienced with here in A Comparison Between Prusa3D vs Creality 3D printers.
In short, your 3D printing experience will vary from other users based on how you set up your 3D printer, printing software, and 3D model being printed. These will directly affect your print quality, and printing time required, and the durability of your 3D printed part. Especially when a 3D printer only costs only a few hundred bucks, we have to adjust our expectations a little.
Here are some of the things that you need to be aware of to better calibrate your expectations with 3D printing.
Perfect Print Quality Showcased Online
If you Googled 3D prints, you’ll see a lot of fantastic creations from 3D printing. From planters, scaled characters from games and movies, to super impressive Iron Man suits!
Some of these 3D prints look so good you wonder if that’s really 3D printed or professionally finished product. Especially some of the Ironman suits. It looks exactly like the movie!
Talk about having a full ironman or Star Wars character costumes that you can show off during friends visits, comic cons or halloween! It will be perfect gifts for you kids or niece and nephews if not for yourself!
Keep in mind, people love to showcase their best creations and skills or talents on every social media platform. Some even charge a hefty price tag to sell you a fully painted set.
It’s definitely possible to reproduce high quality multi-colored pieces. However, there may be hours of post processing work that goes into finishing a 3D printed object to make it look great.
Process of sanding, smoothing, painting, clear coat, and all these activities can take a significant amount of time and effort. Not to mention you have to be able to do all of these in the space you have.
If you are an artistic person or an artist by training, you might find that 3D printing serves as an additional platform where you can express your artistic creations. Just like some artists create sculptures from wood, ice, metal etc. You can create things with plastic without the hefty cost of injection molds.
Sounds like a lot of work isn’t it?
Introducing! Multi-Material-Units Add-on
Well, what if there is another device that you can add on to certain printers that prints in multiple colors? Or materials? Wouldn’t that be cool! This could potentially save you time in trying to custom paint some of your prints, although every device has its limitations.
These multi-material units or MMU allows you to print with different materials and colors on a single print all fully automated! Almost like going from a black and white printer to a color printer!
Let me introduce you to Prusa i3 MK3S MMU2S and The Palette 2 (or Pro) by Mosaic.com.
You guessed it! The Prusa i3 MK3S MMU2S allows you to add multi-materials or colors to a Prusa i3 MK3S printer. It cost $299 before shipping which is about half the price of a Palette 2S.
The Palette 2S ($599) or Palette 2S Pro ($799) are more universal to which 3D printer they can be added to. You can read about it in the Mosaic.com site. Once I have reviewed this product, I will be sure to let you know of my experience using it.
Here is My Experience with Prusa i3 MK3S MMU2S.
Now, you can Go Here to read more about the details about MMU units which we will skipp here. This is just to reinforce the need to know WHY and WHAT you intended to print.
Which in turn helps you decide on which 3D printer to get and if it is capable of expanding on that printer when you are ready for more sophisticated creations.
It’s best to start off with just a single color and single type of material to get your arms wrapped around 3D printing before moving to other materials.
Printing Time
In various Facebook groups created for Prusa3D or Creality3D or any other 3D branded printers users, you’ll find that members love to boast about how long a print took. Some even requested prayers for their printers that had started a print days ago and are on it’s last hours of prints. Praying that it will not fail during the 11th hour or more like 111th hour.
Did I mention DAYS to print one thing?? You hear me right!
It is common that a very large prints that fills the print volume would take days to print and some even weeks.
Just to put things in a bit more perspective, printing something as big as a 12oz coffee cup could take from 5 hours with a larger nozzle that prints in large layers increments.
The same cup would print for over 2 days 14 hours on a very fine detailed print (which is a ridiculous setting anyways). That’s if you have fancy designs on the face of the cup that requires very fine detailed print setting.
Here are some example of the cup being sliced in PrusaSlicer Software.
Why would someone print a simple cup at that high resolution? Well.. except for here just to make a comparison point. haha
Even a small object like the very popular Benchy/small boat used as a test print will take between 42 mins to over 97mins depending on how you set up the printer and the slicer software. The size of this Benchy is
To learn more about Printer Setup and Slicing software, click here.
Parts Durability
When an object is made by laying a string of melted soft plastic line by line, layer by layer, these 3D printed parts depending on how you orientate the print and if you add materials to beef up slim sections of the designs, will be weaker and break easier than an injection molded part.
Unlike injection molded parts, there no outside forces to squeeze molten plastic together to create an ultra bonded print.
How much easier does print parts break? That really depends on a few factors.
Read about here: Things that Affect Strength of 3D Prints.
What about using this cup outdoors or in my car?
Will it survive in a dishwasher clean cycle?
Can I pour hot coffee into the 3D printed Cup?
What about microwaving it?
Simple answer is it depends on which material is used to print the Cup.
ABS or ASA filaments are known to withstand UV rays and hot weathers outside without deforming or breaking down. So, yes for outdoors, vehicles, dishwashers when printed with ABS.
Pouring hot coffee into ABS or ASA, it will hold the hot coffee no problem. But I don’t recommend drinking from it. I’m no chemist or plastic expert. I don’t know what kind of stuff from the ABS or ASA will be released into the hot coffee. So just go buy yourself a coffee mug. Unless you are printing a mug for use as a planter.
I don’t know why you would want to microwave a 3D printed cup… just unnecessary.
Not trying to discourage you in getting 3D printer but merely making sure you are aware before you even start. Today’s more affordable consumer level 3D printers do rely of it’s operator to product great quality print.
Even the popular Prusa printers cannot guarantee a first perfect print 100% of the time. Not even their factory assembled units.
That’s just ridiculous and untrue you say?
Check out this post for more elaborated details of everything that could go right or wrong on your first 3D prints.
Download or Create your own 3D Models to Print
Remember Question 2: What will it be printing, specifically?
It is much easier to get started by printing designs downloaded from the internet if you don’t already know how to design using a CAD software package. You can focus on learning how to operate the 3D printer and get familiar using one slicer software to get started. This will cut your learning curve at least by half!
Knowing How to Set Up Your 3D Printer Properly is half the battle to a successful print. The other half is loading a properly sliced model from the slicing software into the printer.
What is this slicer software I keep mentioning? Read this on The Basics of Slicer Software for 3D Printing.
Once you have browsed through downloadable models that you really want to print, check to see if most of the downloadable models will fit the printer you have in mind or if you resize it, it will still be acceptable. Now you are one step closer to selecting the correct 3D printer for your needs.
Creating your own 3D models to print is another level of sophistication for beginners. If you are a professional CAD operator, please feel free to skip this section.
If you are like me who are mediocre at best in drawing stick figures, the ability to create 3D models in a CAD software to bring your imagination to reality in a virtual space will be like a god send. These days, not only can you take what’s in your brain and show it to people exactly what you have in mind, you can also 3D print it to show in the real world. How freaking cool is that!
If you can design it, chances are, you can print it. Within limitation of course. I mean if you think you can design and print rockets to go to space… Ok. Ok. SpaceX is printing parts for their rockets but they have a big budget. You are going to need very big printers and some very expansive materials. Would you ride it in? LOL
Check out this post about The Basics of 3D CAD Modeling. You’ll appreciate learning this skill, eventually.
Operation and Storage : Safety, Fumes, Pets, Kids, Maintenance, Updates
The location where you stored or plan to store your 3D printer and where you operate it is crucial to your safety and sanity at times. It’s preferred that you don’t need to take the printer out of storage just to do a few prints and have to store things away. It will just deter you from making full use of your 3D printer.
Once you decide on which printer you might want to own or for some of you already bought, look up the external dimensions of the printer. Carefully watch a few demo videos of how the printer operates. Where are all the moving parts, cables, and how far does each moving part extend possibly past its external dimension.
You should leave enough space between the printer and its surroundings to have access to different parts of the printers and to allow sufficient clearance with moving parts. Not forgetting where the spool of filament will need to be placed while printing and some extra storage for additional filaments.
If you plan to expand into MMU units later, you might have to rethink your printer setup location so don’t worry too much about it for now. Unless you are literally renovating your space to accommodate your new 3D printer then you’ll want to account for every possible future upgrade and add-on.
Once you have a location in mind, I recommend placing a smoke detector close to the printer. After all, parts of the printer could heat up above 260ºC (500ºF)!!!
It’s rare that your print will catch fire. However, there are a lot of heat and high powered electrical wirings. Safety precaution is always wise. Similar reasons to Smoke alarms are placed in kitchen space.
This is the Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm I’m using next to my printers.
Speaking of add-on, certain materials used in 3D printers like ABS, ASA, Nylon and others recommend to be printed in an elevated temperature environment. The common solution is to simply place the 3D printer in an enclosed box or enclosure for short. You can either follow DIY Enclosure Built Instructions or purchase an Enclosure That Fits Your 3D printer.
Having an enclosure not only helps elevate the temperature of the printing space, it also helps contain bad odors from some of these materials especially ABS that puts out plastic smells. You can extend a vent that attaches to the enclosure with an auxiliary fan to vent out gases that are not friendly to you when printing ABS, ASA, of other materials.
Some 3D printers generate higher noise levels than others while few are nearly silent. However, it’s hard to avoid the distractions when parts of the 3D printer move around doing it’s thing. Hence, I would suggest avoiding placing it in your bedroom, kid’s room, or places where you entertain guests, and definitely not in the bathroom to avoid a high humidity environment.
In short, the benefit of having a good enclosure will allow you to use a wider range of materials for printing, help dampen out noisy printers while make quiet printers almost silent, and vent away bad gases.
Read more about 3D printer enclosure here: What is an enclosure for a 3D printer and where to get one?
For those of you who have long hair or manly long facial hair, please practice caution and make sure to securely put those beautiful hair away. There are fans, moving belts, and motors which can potentially give you a free hair trimming or give your hair a good tug to jam the system.
You always feed the correct filament and NEVER hair or limbs to the 3D printer when it’s operating.
Please review all the safety precaution documents that come with your printer. There are a lot of hot surfaces on the printer that will burn you during operation.
Same caution applies to other creatures you may have freeloading in your home.
Costs: Time, Money, Power Usage, Relationships?
Power Usage
A 3D printer does not cost that much to operate. For a small printer like Prusa i3 MK3S, it only has a 240W power supply which requires a 2A @120V outlet for North America.
Let’s say you pay about $0.15 per kW for electricity just to simplify things.
You have got brave and went for a huge 100hrs print project.
That’s 240W/1000 = 0.24kW x 100hrs x $0.15 = $3.60
$3.60 worth of electricity for a 100 hrs print Maximum!
In reality, the printer will usually draw about half of that for PLA and increases as the hotter the filaments need to print at like ABS or PETG.
Plus if you get an enclosure, it will reduce that power consumption for hot filament prints as it will keep some of the heat in. Hence, reducing power needed to keep the heated bed and nozzle at the correct temperature.
Another benefit to having an enclosure and it practically pays for itself over time. There are a few more benefits here!
Time
If you get a Prusa3D MK3S Kit 3D printer, you’ll probably spend a good 8 to 10 hours assembling the kit. That is normal as a first timer, most of you will tend to be extra careful when following the assembly instructions, making sure you didn’t break or scratch anything, and marveling over how it’s designed.
Once you get past the assembly phase, learning the menus and trying to get it to print something or anything should not take long at all. Especially when you have completed our series of Preparation for 3D Printer 101 and check every box on this list.
You’ll be printing awesome things in no time.
Money
Filaments are the most expensive part of 3D printing. Especially when you opt for exotic materials and silky finish. Good PLA average around $25 for each 2.2lbs (1kg) spool and PETG is more expensive around $33 – $36/kg and when you get to Carbon Fiber filled or Nylons it’ll go up to $40-50/kg.
A 1kg spool can print quite a lot if you are printing small objects. But if you are printing large items, best to review this Tutorial on PrusaSlicer to get an idea of how much filament you might need.
Relationships
Be warned that if you have a significant other who finds out about what she or he can print with YOUR 3D printer, you’ll have to start negotiating print time… or better yet, BUY 2 printers!
The amount of time you’ll be spending 3D printing and CAD modeling will most likely eat into your time with other people. Once you have harnessed the power of 3D printing, it will become your preciousss… Only yours!
So you have been warned.
What computer do you need to operate a 3D Printer?
3D Slicer Software
For mainly downloading 3D models online to print, you can use any basic Windows 10 or Mac OSX computers with access to preferably an SD card slot or a USB slot with an SDCard adapter.
Majority of the time, you’ll be using a Slicer software to create printable 3D files once you have a printer profile set up in the Slicer software. There are a few 3D slicer software available that can be used universally between different brands of printers.
Prusa3D provides a free custom PrusaSlicer software to use with Prusa3D printers with everything preloaded into the software. All you need to do is learn a few basics, go through the setup wizards in the PrusaSlicer and the 3D printer, and you are off to the races. They try to make the experience as easy and as simple as possible for their customers. This is why I’m a big fan of Prusa3D. PrusaSlicer works on both Windows and Mac.
Here is The Basics Of PrusaSlicer Software.
Creality3D provides their own slicer software in the MicroSD card in every printer they ship. I would recommend not spending any time using their slicer software unless your Creality Branded 3D printer requires firmware updates. This software only runs on Windows operating system.
Here is some information on How To Setup Creality 3D Printers Profile In PrusaSlicer.
Ultimaker Cura slicer software by Ultimaker is also a great free 3D slicer software to learn but it has a much steeper learning curve. Cura Slicer provides a lot more flexibility on how you want a 3D model to be set for printing, however, having too much freedom to change so many options can take a longer time, patience, and money to learn. Once you have got a hang of 3D printing and using a PrusaSlicer, Cura is a great alternative. Cura operates on both Windows and Mac systems.
Here is a Basic Guide To Ultimaker Cura Slicer.
There are a dozen other different 3D model slicers available. However, we are going to focus on PrusaSlicer for most of our guides and we’ll add differences in Cura’s settings to achieve the same results as PrusaSlicer.
3D CAD Software
There are also a wide range of 3D CAD software that you can learn in. However, you’ll need a more recent computer with a little more horsepower to drive more complex graphics and cpu for calculating that piece of art you just modeled. Different 3D CAD software has different computer hardware requirements so it’s best to look into the “System Requirements” section of the 3D CAD software you liked to use.
I recommend Fusion360 by Autodesk because it’s free and it works on both Windows and Mac with a built in 3D model slicer. The Fusion360 team also pushes out weekly updates and feature upgrades to continuously improve their user experiences and capabilities of their software. Here is a link to Fusion360’s computer systems requirements.
There are a lot of tutorial videos on Fusion360 by Fusion360’s Team for beginners to advanced users. We will be publishing a few tutorials of key basic features to learn in Fusion360 to get you started in the future. If you are interested, click here to be on the list to be notified the moment we push out tutorial videos and updates on our blogs.
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After “checking” all the boxes, you should read about How to Pick A 3D Printer For Your Needs and start saving.
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