Even though 3D printing slicers have come a long way over the years with crazy fast slicing times and features like organic supports, dynamic extrusion width, and hundreds of different parameters we can play around with, they still work with the same principle, and this is, cutting a part into 2D layers and filling these layers with print moves. And these two-dimensional layers are then simply stacked on top of each other, creating a three dimensional part. This results is one of the biggest problems of extrusion-based 3D printing, which is the significantly lower strength perpendicular to layers compared to in the printing plane. Layers that are stacked on top of each other only partly melt together, creating a weak point, and if these weak points are all in one plane, this is where a part will fail.

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After I recently finished building my new RatRig V-Core 3, I thought it would be a great test for the machine to print the electronics housing for my new precision oven for temperature tests. Unfortunately, after the first print, I noticed that the holes I had properly measured didn’t fit the electronics, and the lid didn’t fit the base. At that moment, I realized I forgot a crucial step of setting up a new, especially self-built machine and that was doing the size calibration.

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I’m pretty regularly in the US, and I love being there, but one of the worst things I have always have to experience, at least from the view of a European, is the amount of waste that’s generated every day. One of the things I find particularly bad is the use of single-use cutlery. I mean, it makes complete sense for takeaway food, but I don’t understand why it’s also used in hotels or even large corporate canteens! Yes, you don’t have to wash it for re-use, but other than that, it’s just horrible! It doesn’t cut properly, it’s flimsy, it’s weak, and even gets soft when hot. Yet, I’ve seen more and more knives, spoons, and forks being labeled as compostable, so theoretically, these can go into the food waste bin if your local facilities accept them. This type of plastic utensils are usually made from PLA or Polylactic acid, which is a bio-plastic that, under ideal conditions in an industrial composting plant, will biodegrade. But PLA is also the most popular material in 3D printing, so I thought, could we recycle compostable plastic cutlery into new 3D printing filament?

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If you've ever printed ABS on an un-enclosed 3D printer you’ll know how painful it is to get a proper print without warping, layer separation and parts that do not directly crumble apart. Fully enclosed 3D printers have been becoming way more popular lately, which makes printing especially high-performance filaments significantly easier. When QIDI recently reached out and asked to sponsor a video featuring their X-Max 3, I got quite excited because this machine is not only fully enclosed but also features an active heater that can get the printing chamber to a toasty 65°C. So this was finally the opportunity for me to test something I and probably many others were asking themselves for ages. How does the layer strength of 3D prints change if we print without enclosure, with a passively heated chamber, or if we even actively heat it! Let’s find out more!

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At the beginning of this summer I visited, the Rocky Mountain RepRap Festival in Loveland, Colorado, and it was once again an amazing experience meeting so many great people and getting inspired by so a ton of interesting projects, like belt Vorons, upside down printers, polar printers, chocolate printers, rotary casting, highly fiber filled co-extrusion filament, pumpkin spice filament and so much more. But before we dive a little deeper, I first had to get there, so travel montage here we go!

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High-flow 3D printer nozzles are in my opinion one of the most important additions to 3D printing of the last years because they are able to melt material way more quickly at the same size as a standard nozzle. No more long, unstable hotends and custom fan shrouds. E3D released their REVO hotend system over a year ago which is great if you swap nozzles regularly yet it uses custom and design-patented nozzles so you’re only able to use their nozzles. And this was a serious problem and the reason why I replaced the REVO hotend on my LDO VORON 2.4 with a Phaetus Rapido at some point. In the beginning, E3D only sold brass nozzles for Revo, so I wasn’t able to work with abrasive filaments, and they didn’t offer any high-flow options. Their abrasion-resistant ObXidian nozzle finally started shipping some weeks ago and we now also have REVO High Flow where E3D teamed up with Bondtech to bring the Core Heating Technology to REVO. Links to both are down in the description if you want to pick one up!

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Even if you don’t own a Bambulab printer, you might have already stumbled over a print where you had matte surfaces on one height and shiny ones on another. This has been becoming a more and more common problem when we try to print faster and faster. We have now reached the point where printers, even with 0.4 mm nozzles, run faster than their hotends are capable of melting the plastic that you want to extrude. If we take this Benchy right here and compare glossy and matte surfaces to the flow visualization, so how much material is extruded per second, we can see that they perfectly correlate. Glossy sections are printed with a low flow rate, and matte ones significantly faster. This behavior is not only something you can use for artistic purposes, but it’s also an indication that a 3D printer is working just at its melting limit.

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Even though extruders for 3D printers only need to push the filament into the hotend they come in many different forms and shapes. Everyone knows the most basic feeders from Ender printers with a single gear directly on the stepper shaft. But there are a ton of more advanced extruders, with dual gears next to each other, dual gears in parallel, small extruder gears, large extruder gears, and even one that pushes filament forward with a belt. All of that driven with large stepper motors, small steppers, planetary gearboxes, or even worm drives. I gathered a bunch of them over the years and tested all of the for their pushing force and extrusion consistency! Why? Well, for ages, I’ve had a project on my mind, which is small-scale injection molding using 3D printer. If you are intrigued by this idea, then don’t forget to subscribe to not miss that project. Anyways - for injection molding, it’s very important to be able to push the molten material with a lot of pressure into the mold so that it’s able to reach even the smallest cavity. Yet crazy projects like injection molding using a 3D printer are not the only reason why strong extruders are important. 3D printers' kinematics have been becoming faster and faster in the last couple of years and if you want to print quickly, you need to push a lot of material with a consistently high force into the nozzle. On the other hand, the extruder, which is often the heaviest part of the hotend, reduces the maximum allowable accelerations, so it also needs to be lightweight.

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The idea for this video started with my wife buying glow-in-the-dark stars for our daughter's new bed, which turned out to be really crappy. At this point, I remembered that I still had an old roll of glow-in-the-dark filament that I purchased way back when I did a bunch of nozzle wear tests. I made some really nice designs that you can, by the way, find over on CNCKitchen.STORE, but the burning question that I had was: did I use the best glow-in-the-dark filament, and how do different glow-colors perform? That’s why I went out and bought filament worth over $250, from the popular brands found on Amazon to some more special ones. I paid for them all by myself, and only the Nobufil PETG was given to me for free. If you want to check them out, there are links in the description!

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3D printing is often called a disruptive technology where anything is possible and engineers have total design freedom. Complexity is free. Well, to some degree, this is true; additive manufacturing can produce parts and shapes that would be impossible with conventional manufacturing techniques, but it also has its limitations. One of these limitations is the overhang angle. The steeper overhangs become, the harder they are to print, and once we reach completely horizontal surfaces, the extruded material will just droop down. Here is where the idea from Steven McCulloch comes into play. He extruded individual arcs next to each other that are self-supporting, and he can this way print huge horizontal surfaces without the need for supports. If you want more details on how the method works, check out my previous video here or linked below.

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