This is my Cetus MK3 that Tiertime sent me more than 2 years ago and I do feel a bit bad that I never reviewed it. The Cetus was praised by many at that time for great print quality and all linear rails construction. Unfortunately, I never really liked it. Well, let’s say I liked the idea of a minimalistic machine but their control board running proprietary firmware, an oversimplified slicer, noise and only okay print quality drew me away from it. I always felt that it could do better when seeing it on my shelf, so I thought I’ll bring it back to life by simply replacing the control board and this way fixing all of my issues. I’ll cover this endeavor in an upcoming video, so if you want to learn how you can simply revive an old 3D printer, put in my case a Mellow FLY E3 with Wi-Fi, silent stepper drivers and RepRap firmware with Input Shaping in it make sure to be subscribed. In this video though I’ll show you how I was able to fix my extrusion inconsistencies because they were not solved by the new mainboard I put in it. In the end the solution was obvious, but it took me a while to get there. The fix was super simple, hence I thought I make a quick video about it.

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Threaded inserts not only look great in 3D printed parts, but they also have a practical use. Everyone has had a device that was assembled with screws. After disassembling and reassembling it a few times, you realize that if the screws dug directly into the plastic, they won't hold anymore. Each time you screw the parts together, the material gets plastically deformed at the threads, which eventually leaves you with nothing but a ragged hole where nothing can grab. This is where thread inserts come into play. By melting them into your parts, they are positively bonded to the plastic and no longer move. The screws are now turned into durable and also low-friction brass and thus will last forever.

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I really enjoy my morning cappuccino, so I thought, why not use the leftover spent coffee grounds and add them to 3D printing filament. But why add coffee to a polymer? Polymer additives can be separated into three groups: reinforcing additives like glass or carbon fibers that improve mechanical properties, functional additives like plasticizer or impact modifiers which act more on a micro or molecular level and the third category which are fillers. Fillers are usually cheap materials to add volume and reduce the price of the final product. Spent coffee grounds are a filler and maybe actually pretty good ones, ecologically and economically speaking. Economically because, it’s a waste product that is widely available. Ecologically because it reduces the use of polymers and pigments and as an organic filler might even improve compostability when added to something like PLA. The coffee particles increase the surface area, absorb more moisture, and act as fertilizer during composting. I’m currently even running a composting-at-home experiment to determine what happens to biopolymers in a non-industrial compost. I’m quite curious how coffee PLA will do there.

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If you are in a foreign country, it's immensely helpful to understand some of the spoken language. And just like on your summer vacation, if you're regularly working with 3D printers or other CNC machines, understanding how G-code is built up and what some of the instructions mean can enable you to not only fix problems but also easily customize prints to your needs.

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Gewindeeinsätze sehen nicht nur toll in 3D gedruckten Bauteilen aus, sie haben auch einen praktischen Nutzen. Jeder hat schonmal ein Gerät gehabt, welches mit Schrauben zusammengebaut war. Wenn man dies einige Male zerlegt und wieder zusammengebaut hat, merkt man, dass die Schrauben, wenn sie direkt in den Kunststoff eingedreht wurden, nicht mehr halten. Jedes Mal wird dabei der Kunststoff plastisch verformt, was irgendwann dazu führt, dass man nur noch ein ausgefranstes Loch hat, in dem nichts mehr hält. Hier kommen Gewindeeinsätze ins Spiel. Durch das Einschmelzen ins Bauteil werden diese formschlüssig mit dem Kunststoff verbunden und bewegen sich nicht mehr. Die Schrauben werden nun ins haltbare und auch reibungsarme Messing eingedreht und halten somit ewig.

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I’m quite sure that almost anyone who owns a 3D printer already had a long print fail at some point just because no material somehow got extruded anymore. This is precisely what happened to me a bunch of weeks ago while filming my filament recycling video. I was easily able to continue mine with some simple G-Code trickery and thought this is actually an essential skill I’d like to teach you. Maybe even make a print fail on purpose and try to recover it with these methods before this happens with a precious 3-day print! Let me know in the comments if you ever recovered a failed print and how you were able to do it! My print failed because I had a small piece of metal in my recycled filament that at some point blocked the nozzle. In your case, you could also run out of power, encounter heat creep, have a knot in your filament, or even run out of filament without a material sensor.

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Recycling failed 3D prints, support structure and everything you don’t need anymore is one of the big dreams of many makers and 3D printer owners. It’s kind of sad that you often throw out quite a lot of material, only because you had a small layer shift or the dimensions were not spot on. For my 3D printing tests, I tend to print a ton of these 3D Benchys that are my benchmark models for printers and materials that tell me so much about the process. They look nice, but since they are horrible floaters, I can’t use them after print tests as bathtub toys for my daughter, and therefore they pile up in my office. Since I currently have a desktop filament extruder and material shredder at my disposal, I thought – let’s recycle these and make new filament out of them! I know that the 3DEVO Desktop Filament Extruder I currently have is not maker equipment with a price tag starting at 5000 bucks. Still, due to its intended use in pre-production and labs, it’s the perfect tool to easily show you what needs to be done to make beautiful new material out of abandoned and failed 3D prints. In the end, this will still give you a great insight into the process that you could try to apply even with self-built equipment at home, similar as I’ve also been doing in the past with my Filastruder. This video will cover the recycling and extrusion process itself. In the following video, I want to discuss if such a system might be feasible at a larger scale and what the challenges and opportunities are.

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Making filament for 3D printing is fundamentally not that hard. You take plastic pellets, mix them with some pigments, melt and feed them through a nozzle, and spool everything up. In this video, we’ll take a look at the relatively simple process of extruding filament from virgin plastic pallets but also quickly touch the challenges of recycling failed prints into a new spool of material which will be the content of the next video in this series.

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Prusament PC Blend, where PC Blend stands for PolyCarbonate compounded with other polymers and additives is Prusa’s engineering grade material. How it really performs and how simple it is to use is what I tested for this video and just as a small teaser, by coincidence I stumbled upon a phenomenon which causes different strength of 3D prints, depending on what type of nozzle you’re using! Let’s find out more!

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PCTG in its full, written form is hard to pronounce but it’s similarly to PETG and also a glycol modified Copolyester for better printability and material performance. It claims to be an alternative to PETG only with better impact strength, surface gloss, and for me, more importantly, almost perfect layer adhesion, and this is also why I was approached by so many to test this material. And this is exactly what I did! We’ll take a look at print quality, tensile strength, stiffness, impact resistance, and thermal resistance to find out if the claims hold true and if this material is something you should consider for your next project!

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