3D Printing Cheaply: Get Started with Free Tools for Additive Manufacturing

I'm going to start by passing around a box a 3D printed Griffins which is college mascot is the golden Griffin um if you haven't encountered three pretty Goods you probably have but you may not know and so this is just give you you can take one of these if you want if you're not interested anyway and you get a sense of these were printed using the same technology that spring away right here in this corner which is called fdm uh Tyler speak a little bit about that but in any event I'll start these around

a few minutes

[Applause]

so I guess we're getting reversed to do to join those and down what we're printing is not very exciting looking it's because we we don't when we do this demonstration we don't generally come in with the idea of what we're going to print as a demo well when we were walking in we saw that the doorstop in this room is really needs replaced well we have our 3D printer here we have a doorstop design we did for our rooms at Old Main so we just said to the printer hey fire out a a door stop and we'll leave it on the way out for whoever has to teach you here Monday morning or this afternoon's

events and that sort of a reflection of you can print all sorts of really exciting things with 3D printing sometimes the least exciting things are the ones you need now and you know the supply chain for a university is probably like for other big institutions so that's like you know what you figure three weeks and purchase order and approvals approvals and yeah

oh great yeah um so I probably should have restarted my computer so that you know uh I had a Google Chrome on it but I wasn't paying attention uh anyway so uh what we're going to go through really quick is I created a kind of like a website for this um if anyone is interested in the website you can actually use this QR code to go to the website my name is Tyler from piate I should have started off with that first I am the instructable designer here at Canisius College which is soon to be called venetious University it's kind of exciting description

yeah he moved it I did move it a little bit I'm sorry

unfortunately if anyone's interested I can of course um let you scan the QR code after the session uh anyway so uh open source and 3D printing actually 3D printing started off as an open source as well at least a commercial 3D print it started off as a commercial I know a open source project there's actually two different open source projects currently the rough wrap project and the Boron project um and I've also listed a couple of uh free printing manufacturers this is for at home 3D printing um in general all prusive printers are based on open source uh software and Hardware um ultimaker started off as an open source project I think they were based on the

rough craft project actually but I'm not very sure about newer ultimaker printers and some of the creality Ender threes are also based on Open Source Hardware and so on uh in general I would say if you aren't really interested and really looking for an open source 3D printer do your own research um I've given you like starters here but that's really about it um so I'm going to start talking about the CAD program that we use as well um we started getting into free CAD which my colleague Dr Mark Gallimore will talk a bit more about in a moment here um so in general we use a CAD software called tinkercad it's called it's freeware it's not open

source unfortunately um but it's it's good freeware in my opinion um so I'm just going to project really quick uh the account for tinkercat is free to even though it is a it's made by Autodesk so you can actually start doing this yourself it's targeted towards middle schoolers mostly um and off to the right here you have a bunch of Base uh objects you can also switch between and go to other types of objects including design starters characters and creatures and so on but right now we'll just stay from the basic shapes uh we'll start off with Cube because that's typically what most free designing models do and all you do is you grab it in the

little sidebar here and you drag it onto your work plane and here you get a bunch of things that you can do you can change uh the radius of it so that it's less pointy and more rounded I'm using the middle Mouse field right here to scroll in also to move around steps the something that scrapbook does because I've been using the other one free CAD a lot more you can change the length the width the height Etc the cool thing about tinkercad though is you don't have to get super complicated with it what I can do actually is if I want to make a hole in this thing say I want to put like a a

tube through this rectangle for whatever reason I can actually go in and wrap this cylinder right here oh well that's good you can tell that I haven't used it in a while I apologize um they added that it must have been this last week gotcha okay but I can resize the cylinder really quick around turns going through

and just to Center the cylinder in uh record or the cube here grab both of them and just align the way real quick and now what I can do with the cylinders I can actually turn it into a hole and group this Cube and the cylinder now I've got a hole in my Cube so this is a very basic project kind of thing that I'm just starting off here but you can kind of see the potential of it right um if I have to go back to my dashboard here I have a few other projects that I can use to tinkercad with or tinkercad 4 rather um I've got a bunch of nameplates that we've used for various people here at

the college [Music] um the door stop yep the door stop which is printing over there right now uh and a couple of different signs that I've created for various uh things as well as a few student projects um this is my favorite sign for semi-obvious reasons if it will

below quick and actually I don't know if we actually brought it but [Music] um yeah if you do decide to go over and take a look at the printer please don't touch it um you might hurt yourself so one of the cool things about tinkercad is that it can also take in what's called an SVG file which is basically just a 2d flat file and you can actually turn it into a 3D object I think that's one of the cool things about tinkercad um that I'm not sure about what other CAD software can do I'm sure they can do something similar but um yeah so back to the presentation um my colleagues will talk about free cat

in just a moment like I said as well as uh resin 3D printing um yeah another thing that you can use is blender we use taker pad for more technical work and free CAD for more technical work but for blender that's great for like sculpting and stuff I'm sure there's a add-on with blender that you can use to turn it into a CAD program as well but I'd rather not get into that so um yeah so to export a STL from tinkercad which I will just use this one um you can just click on export right here and you can choose obj STL or I'm not sure what that file is typically you want an STL file this has the best

information for a slice it a slicer is used by a 3D printer or rather by the object to translate it for a 3D printer so that it can print you can't just take a STL file load it up onto a USB or micro USB and toss it into your printer and expect it to print you need yeah slicer for them we are using prusa minis here at the college so we use the prusa slicer which gives the best information for a producer Minis but

this is the brand name of the brand yes Joseph Cruz on the Czech Republic produces them in the prusa slicer you can zoom in zoom out rotate rotate there we go you can also do the same thing in tinkercad you just use most of the mouse mostly to do all that but to import an object you can just drag and drop it into this thing right here build plate or you can go to import TL file

desktop click on open and this is kind of where the magic happens uh actually Pusa slicer is one of my favorite slices because it does have a lot of automatic things that you can do on it so for example you see this triangle with the exclamation point in it and it's basically saying hey this thing is broken and that's one of the things you always have to worry about when you are designing models for 3D printing that something on it is not going to work correctly when you just send it through the slicer so if I just click on that it will try to fix it for me foreign there we go it fixed it I don't know

what was wrong with it if I'm being completely honest uh I thought it was a good file but um obviously it is not uh I can also resize this uh there's a bunch of uh options over here to move and resize it as needed um but I like using these scale factors right here so I'll just say 75 and there we go so other things that you can do with a Slicer in some cases when you are modeling or creating models rather you need to use supports um so that overhangs I think over 50 degrees maybe a little bit less don't just print in midair when they start printing and create spaghetti is what it's called

actually on the 3D printing Reddit you'll see lots of spaghetti and people making eating it and stuff I think someone may recently meatballs for their spaghetti too so that was interesting um but anyway I typically just use the automate uh the auto supports um because I figured the slicer is going to know what it needs to do for the printer but you can make your own supports um this particular object does not actually need supports because it's in that angle there that rather that range of degrees that doesn't support so I'm actually going to turn that off uh infill that's basically so on the outside is uh several solid layers which is called the outer um wall uh infill is

the stuff inside of that which I'll show you in just a second that gives it the extra strength otherwise you can print Apollo if you are willing to do that which can be great because they can fill it with resin or some other thing that cures and thinks more solid if you would like to do that so I'll just click on slice now and lower right right here

I should mention that most slicers have all this um all these things that I'm showing you as well I just like I said I just like to use inclusive slicers because it's got more of those things and it's also built for our gruesome printer so looking at this you can see all sorts of information in the upper left right here including about how much time it's going to take to do each part of the model and this is going to take a total of four hours and 14 minutes I usually add at least an extra half an hour just because it's not always accurate so but one of the cool things that I like about the acoustic slicer here and like

I said most other 3D um slicers have this as well on the right here I can actually go through and take a look at this layer by layer which is really neat I'm going to find a layer that actually has infill though the bottom and there we go so this is infill these red lines right here I don't know if you can see it super well on the projector but and this will provide support for the inside of the model so that when you are pressing against it or putting pressure on some of the walls it's not going to just immediately fold in on itself and you can see an example of a partially created bottle up here that

has that energy so um so you said earlier that you can fill it with you how about would that work so you would actually pause the printer mid print and then start filling it um and then you'd let the printer go continue on and then as it gets up another set of layers you would pause it Do It All Over Again keep on going from there um it's kind of backwards I admit but I think there's a couple of different techniques you could also print a hole in it Pour it in afterwards and play it right which you have to do for resin printing anyway so I can also set the infill to 100 which uh you really don't want to do

necessarily um it'll take a lot longer for one thing and for another thing uh after I think about 20 25 ish the benefit of printing more in film just is in worth it after about 25 you're just not getting as much return on it um will it let you set the infill low enough that it will be structural type of issues or it doesn't have a limit so it can actually so I can actually set this infill to zero okay uh We've replaced that really quick and then cam Crossfire yeah it depends on the model number yeah does it know that it's going to cause problems or no oh no no no 3D print a printer and the slicer

will let you do all sorts of bad ideas so you want to stand in your way pretty much yeah exactly um alrighty so I did that a lot faster than I thought it was going to uh does anyone have questions really quick is something like Percy slicer available except any sort of free printer like just like an open source um and so I I like a second question of that is there any sort of three return that you know not use another like software for slicing so the slicer as far as like what printers can and cannot be used are base slicers have printer profiles so what they're called that has all the information on the printer in some cases

you have to customize it yourself and in other cases it's just there for you that you can just grab um other slicers that are used um in general is Ultimate repair and most printers also have their own slicer which is based on open source software like slicer or ultimaker here like I just mentioned it seems like any like or not any seems like Pusa slicer has a from Michael research it has a feature that allows you to like cut up a file like without having done it yourself yep if you have something like too big to print on your yeah I haven't used that myself because I usually keep it with the size of the minis because you don't

usually need to print anything bigger than that but yeah it can do that yeah I have a personal project that um is bigger than the printer that's available uh one of the cool things about the slice uh proves the slicer that I'll just mention really quick is that they are going to have something called jury supports which is going to make it a lot easier to reprint things because you're not and it's going to make 3D printing a lot faster as well because you're just printing the stuff that you need rather than everything so do you have a question no it's okay cool all right anyone else yep all right I'll pass off human markings

I'm going to start by saying the credit here goes completely to Tyler um I wrote an office called the center for online learning and innovation which is the fancy way of saying we help people use digital stuff to do a better job teaching learning at the college professional work and Tyler joined joined my office in 2020 and really brought 3D printing away I had Notions that I wanted to 3D print uh because of some personal hobby stuff I do which is going to be sort of made manifest here in a minute but uh he made it seem a lot more practical and doable and ultimately uh is the reason my office is involved and just as a sort of an overview

um we have done we've had a lot of different student projects that we've printed for classes uh for the local tabletop gaming Society who obviously is very heavily invested right now in 3D printing the broader community um and

text it's

so that was it it's a part of the problem um and we kind of done a thing which you probably shouldn't do with a budget which is build and they will come um but once we had these hammers Nails appeared everywhere like we had all kinds of uses for 3D printing like we want door stops in a hurry uh a poetry class wants to write about an object in their Mind's Eye before it's a thing and then return and write about it after it's a thing a three-dimensional object and and explore differences in thinking about that object's different states and we could very easily do this with additive manufacturing 3D printing um so it's been a very successful program I

think we've certainly got our money's worth um these printers like the one that's printing on the end here these are hundreds not thousands of dollars um cruises a little more on the expensive end these days uh compared to any cubic elegu uh creality there's a bunch of different brands of printer and you can go to Reddit communities and see all kinds there's whole communities built around these different brands of these different products um but that's really when it comes to fdm that's your major cost is the printer itself the reels they obviously cost money my experience is the plastic a little goes a very very long way because there's just not a lot of Weights because the

United States you buy a product and let's face it you know half of it you're throwing out it's called packaging right so um you know the the the door stop for that door is going to be a couple pennies worth of plastic and and that that opens up all sorts of all sorts of possibilities now I'm gonna I'm gonna do two things I want to talk about resin and then I'm going to talk about where we've gone recently with cat and we've gone into a product called free cab which is a truly open source product um resin I'm going to start with resin printing um resin printing the physical aspects of it are not as simple as

fbm fem is plastic that gets extruded through a hot end nozzle and sort of gets written in layers you go over and you could within a few seconds you're going to understand what you're looking at okay so it's writing in three dimensions with hot blasting the plastic pools I have an object resin Works a little differently and there's more complications involved so that reasonable people might say sure I will have an fdm printer of a filament printer like that in my home and I'll run it no problem I might draw the line before buying a resin printer given that I have to buy additional chemicals and handle additional chemical processes now I do this in my home this is my personal

printer uh it's a relatively inexpensive elegu Mars II that's trivial it runs the same as any cubics models um and we have downstairs in a lab a much more expensive still hundreds not over a thousand dollar uh bigger better any cubic model um you can buy dedicated support equipment like a a box that shines ultra violet light and rotates the the printed artifact to carefully bathe it in UV light or you can do what I did which is buy a very inexpensive box for UV activated nail polish and that's what I bake my prints in the price was right so I I may upgrade in the future haven't gotten around to it and the figurines you see over there the

sort of tabletop gaming figurines there's a pair of little Badgers and medieval Garb were printed using this printer not the nicer one we have downstairs um so it shows what is possible so I have to plug in my mouth spring to work another Hardware problem

yeah yeah I too have used tinkercad when I go on to talk about pre-cad I learned a parametric drawing with tinkercad after I'm done talking I I'm going to use freecad going forward at least for a while I may transition to blender in the future but I recommend tinkercad to get started and it's what we teach students to use because it is so simple to use as Tyler demonstrated um this is free pad it allows more sophisticated Parts uh this is actually a multi-part Arrangement it's more than one part that fits together in a sliding fashion I I use off-the-shelf metric Hardware to create a pin that goes through here so these two parts slide

open and it's a fixture for painting things

but I wanted to discuss how a resin printer worked so you get a sense of what's going on in this technology so on this printer there is a build plate suspended above a vat liquid resin is poured into that vat to start with the digital art is given to the printer and to start printing the printer lowers the build plate you can see there's a there you can barely see there is a screw elevation actuator behind the build plate lowers it into the back the bottom of the back is a clear plastic and it's called fep so the 3D printers refer to the fat underneath that clear plastic which is tightly sealed so the resin doesn't leak

hopefully hopefully it's tight concealed underneath that built into the box that's the base of the printer is an LCD screen and the earliest of these prayers used basically um old cell phone screens New Old Stock that had been manufactured for earlier cell phones and the tooling was now used to make these LCD screens for 3D printers 3D printing has moved beyond that to um dedicated LCD screens that are monochromatic they just illuminate using ultraviolet light and so the process is the build plate goes down a layer is a silhouette it starts as a silhouette of UV light that is flashed up through a very very thin quantity of the liquid resin that's between the fat and the build plate

and that silhouette is within a second or two flashed into hard resin because the resin is photopolymer activated when exposed to UV light it hardens goes from a collection of monomers and other supporting chemicals to a pond next layer the build plate comes up the UV light flashes second layer third layer might be a totally different silhouette and so on and so on over a period of minutes or hours depending on how tall your print is so fdm printers the time it takes to print is based on really all three dimensions and a few other things that you can set in terms of printer settings the principal determinant of a SLA resin print the time it's going to take to

print is usually its height because it flashes the whole Layer Two dimensions of the layer all at once

once the print is done it lifts away from the back and you have the next problem to solve there is liquid resin still coating your solid print so you need to remove this print from your build plate and then you need to remove that liquid resin from the print for two big reasons one because you're going to do a follow-up UV bath to completely Harden that part so that it's ready to use and this stuff is toxic this resin is toxic um if depending on your own chemistry if it gets on your hands it may be harmless for a few minutes a few hours it may cause serious chemical burns after a few minutes after a few hours

once the parts are cleaned bathe them in UV to complete the hardening process the polymerization process a few minutes does the job if you are like me and you have a kind of a Jerry rigged home setup you may have to turn the parts over just like you were grilling hot dogs to make sure that the UV gets where you want it to be this also illustrates something else it's not a great photo because they're kind of small up here but just as Tyler mentioned supports with fdm with resin printing depending on the orientation of the part and the size and shape of the part and its details you need to in a slicer attach

supports and they get printed along with the thing you want at the end of it and you clip them away or to watch YouTubers if you rip them away which may leave dimples in your part that you may or may not care about so this is like screws when you're doing metal cast it is exactly like Spruce and metal casting and traditional plastic models now it's a different manufacturing process but the term sprue is that Parts Runner you got when you had an AMT car model and you rip the parts off as a kid and stuck them together with glue it's a lot like fruit yeah

I am a plastic modeler full disclosure um that's how I got into this that's the the path that that took me here although I didn't really take the plunge until I until Tyler made it look easy um my I'm smugly proud of the fact that I used uh 21st century machine tool to make a miniature 1940s Machine Tool a drill press I went to Popular Mechanics Magazine on Google Books and found ads for drill presses Around the World War II era and I drew the parts up in tinkercad okay that's a piece of brass Rod there was no point in having a 3D printer print something that's easy to get um and here's the parts

a jack stand and Jacks for a car model windows and doors or structures that's a traditional plastic model I put together I bought that in a hobby shop and so is the Canadian Soldier here

no I don't wear this on a regular basis at home the picture is for dramatic purposes but my emphasis is play it safe either decide this is not for you because not only are you handling this resin you do wear nitrile gloves when working with a prayer I wear eye protection and I do wear a white lab coat just so I could see if something's flashed and it's not on my clothing it's not on me I just quickly look at the lab coat when I'm before I take it off um to clean this resin off there are water washable resins but they're environmentally controversial and they work better if as a cleaning solution you use alcohol

isopropyl you can get full strength isopropyl alcohol on Amazon from medical suppliers that sort of thing that works best there are everyone there's a million different ideas people have about how to clean resin off that's usually the starting chemical people talk about um so this is what you have to have in your home I do it I do it now I have a dedicated workspace I don't do this on the kitchen table and then put everything in the in the closet when I'm done um but tabletop War Gamers do this other people jewelry makers do this it is realistic um to do this at home so to speak but it is something to consider investigating before you say oh resins

for me why would you use resin um because the quality of the prince in terms of the fineness of detail and smoothness of surfaces relatively is better with resin if you look at the little miniature that you may have gotten out of the box that went around it looks pretty good compare it to the fantasy Soldiers the little Badgers over there if you get a chance and you're going to see the difference resin this is the why tabletop War Gamers traditionally have gone to resin many miniature makers jewelry makers traditionally gone to resin um but for a lot of what you're doing with 3D printing you may not need that quality if you buy a 3D printer

so I bought an fdm printer uh I printed my wife uh is takes care of house plants is getting into gardening I printed her a whole bunch of pots and other tools and implements for supporting house plants I printed my daughter toy animals uh that have been weirdly hard to get in plastic in scale with other toys that we that she has from Fisher Price uh so you may say well for my needs I just don't need the the additional complications of resin and and that's great that's absolutely right but just so that you walk away today going okay I get this there's two basic kinds of compute of consumer 3D printing um here's what they involve and as you can

see that with this printer you know we were able to bring this into the classroom hitch the plastic into it start it up and and we don't need all the post-processing stuff if you are interested in seeing a resin printer and some of the related equipment and chemicals involved let us know afterwards and sometime today we can we can set up time we can go down to our our lab downstairs and show one too just so you have an idea of what that looks like if you're at all interested the second thing I want to talk about is freecad for several reasons so tinkercad I love tinkercad I I really give Autodesk the company a

lot of credit for making a robust easy to use tool set free and it's used across education for all the right reasons however you will eventually run into limitations if you really get into design designing your own 3D parts or other things and there you're going to need to adopt a a more sophisticated tool set no supplies um Tyler mentioned blender which is excellent for more sculpting kinds of work and there are ways in which it can be used in a cad type of uh CAD type of way I will probably try to learn blender in the next two years I went for free CAD because I come from a family of Engineers and so CAD is a I

knew all I knew what CAD was and I knew some things about it before ever I downloaded free cam uh and it comes recommended as a Next Step past tinkercad I'll buy a lot of 3D printers however I'm going to finish I don't know if I'll have time to to show it but I will say it has a bug it's adamant it's Defenders are adamant that that's not a bug that's an unfortunate feature it's a body for normals for people hobbyists Weekend Warriors um and that does to some degree can limit its usefulness it has not scared me away because I've worked with it and I I've worked around it um but anyway let me get let me get started

um I'm not going to show you how to use it so that you'll walk away and be able to it's too complicated to do in 10 minutes but I will show you the workflow that will make the tutorial YouTube videos make sense faster which is which is really with free pad that's usually the thing about well there's this really steep learning curve a really difficult learning curve I'm hoping to make that easier by showing you the basic workflow to get to a part design in the software so freecad it looks like a drawing software okay it has these workbenches which are collections of tools you use to do all kinds of different work and there are

whole workbenches of tools that are not useful necessarily for 3D printers or they they don't mention them anyway they may be more useful for architects designing houses or something real size houses um typically YouTube videos teaching beginner free CAD for the use in in 3D printing say go to the park design workbench that's your your headquarters for 3D printing so I am going to create a new drawing and obviously there's a new button just like Microsoft Word um and then I'm going to make sure I happen to be on the part design workbench so I'll stay at the park design art design workbench um then the process is this you create a 3D object from an initial

2D drawing and then you subsequently make additional features or cut pockets depressions holes things like that in your initial 3D part with more 2D drawings and you'll see what I mean so I click this button here that takes me to the Sketcher to do a 2d drawing and freecad says which plane of the global coordinate system do you want this part to be oriented with or against you can see what's going on here X Y plane horizontal x z y z two vertical planes 90 degrees from one another and 90 degrees from the horizontal and in freecad these are also referred to as the origins so I'll click the X Y plane and then here

um my tool sets are all missing because the whole screen is

cheap like click on the double arrows next to

yeah okay this will work so I'm actually going to start by creating a circle and I let's make it around 60 but we don't need to be accurate to start with and I'll create another Circle and these are just Mouse clicks what you'd expect

in if the first thing you walk away with about free pad today is 2D drawings and the 3D drawings using that part design workbench using the Sketcher workbench your drawing objects and then you are constraining them you're using what are called constraints to make sure those objects are precisely what you want literally and figuratively precisely what you want so I click on one of these circles I find where the um okay constraints There's a constraint tool here to just constrain the size of the circle so I'm going to say 80 millimeters actually let's take that one down to 40 millimeters okay and I'll zoom in a little bit click on the second Circle and I'm used to seeing all my toolbars this

is why it's this is this is a bit more challenging 80 okay and then I will add two lines

and then I will click one of the points click the arc and I will use what's called constraint tangent to connect them and so in general you get a good idea of what's going on here um you're going to use a series of the different drawing tools which are not by themselves dissimilar to what you might find in you know Google drawings something like that more complicated are these constraints so now I've got only one quote-unquote degree of freedom and that's I can move the length to establish the length of this part and here are this is showing me how the constraints have attached um diameters and I can move those around uh I'm then going to need to get rid of

so that it can extrude it can make a 2d drawing into a 3D part I need to get rid of these interior lines here that would confuse freecad because they're connected to this exterior wires for CAD calls it the outer perimeter of the part so I'm going to finally hit the button right here trim Edge click that trim this part trim that part okay I'll hit close on the Sketcher tools and I have my wire two-dimensional drawing now I will make sure that's highlighted and click the pad icon and it's a 3D drawing yay uh and I can set that to well let's set it to 30 millimeters High that's fine that'll work well now

because it's a it's a real CAD program I can add what I need I need a hole here let's say it's for a crankshaft I need a hole here let's say it's for a Fastener of some kind I can look at this pad as it's called which was the the act of turning it into a three-dimensional drawing I'm actually going to rename that instead of just the generic path I'm going to call it height I recommend speaking as a newbie get into naming things in this tree otherwise as you create more and more things and you've got a bunch of things called sketch sketcho one sketcho two sketcho three pad01 pattern you're not going to know what you're looking at

anymore rename it however you want to do it but inside of that I can still find the sketch so I click on that I'm back here and I can draw a uh don't know what Circle and I'm going to draw a tiny Circle here then I'm going to use that a little differently now I can close and automatically freecad says okay he wants the reverse of the elevation he wants those to be holes those to be voids great this one's a little special though I'm going to click on the edge of that Circle and I'm going to come up to um going to go to this tool set and I can create just a depression but I

want to I want to use the whole tool specifically this is for standard Hardware Fasteners maybe among other things but under profile I can find metric Hardware and that is anyone who's ever built a PC let's choose an M6 screw it's going to size the hole appropriately for that size screw I can then do some other things if I wanted to a machine screw that I needed to countersink I could automatically install that or count of four and let's say 12 millimeters wide and a millimeter depth of one okay so I'm giving you a simple example now I could immediately draw another depression on this Plate at a different depth let me go kick them back by clicking on

this surface and then using the Sketcher to do a drawing it probably would be fine however if I did it that way and I later modified this solid that I've already created it might throw an error it might move that to pressure that some other face this is what's called a topographical naming error and free CAD suffers from it pretty badly and pretty quickly other CAD drawing softwares can suffer from it but not nearly as quickly or badly this is open source software the developer team does what they can with the resources they have probably time being a big one so this is something that maybe Autodesk would work out pretty quickly if it appeared

in Fusion 360 or something like that but right there are workarounds to that problem and I'm already comfortable with those workarounds so I will continue using freecad but it does sort of illustrate this is the dilemma with open source and the fact that there is this sort of extra step and a community comes divided rapidly some folks say um oh this is a deal breaker I'm not going to use free CAD others say well but the workaround is actually not a workaround it's an excellent engineering practice which is to create a datum plane um and then attach that datum plane you can see the datum plane I can attach it as a proxy to this surface and then draw on

the datum plane and then even if this changes the datum plane actually has that additional sketch it's complicated but you'd figure it out if you wanted to and you know you get Engineers on the web who are like well that's actually the proper way to do CAD anyway so you want to you know eat your vegetables and use data planes anyway and I don't know I come from a family of Engineers so I'm I'm sort of yeah right on you know your mileage may vary I will also admit that look if this part if I know these dimensions are good I might just add a sketch directly on that surface get the part done send it to the printer pal I'm

done no problem because I'm not going to make extensive modifications to what I have that could cause that error to throw um and then in freecad I've just given you this this basic uh all right I didn't do it okay let's just cancel I've given you the basic get started way to think about it 2D drawings extrude them to 3D either parts or holes using the part design workbench and the Sketcher workbench now go watch the Youtube videos with great YouTube tutorials out there and it will make sense hopefully in 10 of the time it did for me when I had to sort of figure that out just with the internet thank you for coming today uh take a look at the 3D

printed examples and the printer over there cranking out a door stop

[Applause] Griffin we'll have that over there as well and questions comments it's it's lunch time so we'll we'll be here for as long as anybody needs anybody wants to buy some money what time are you thinking about doing the resolution very interesting uh what's what's fascinated for you I mean since you've asked we can do it like in a few minutes from now if you'd rather eat lunch and there's essentially late lunch yeah maybe late in the lunch hour sure 12 50 years 12 45 or something yeah what do we say 12 40. how long do you think it'll take not much I mean I'll show it to you I'll take the top off it and you can see how it works or

something right now we don't have plan somebody really wanted me to fire up we could but but we don't really have plans to do that just because of the um there's not a lot to see when we started up I mean you know

it's all happening it's that's a good point so meet here at 12 40. sure yeah that'll work you ever talked about it's like somebody doesn't want to go

if you were looking in the binder what where like what precautions and stuff you might have one take to you ensure that it doesn't malfunction if you place of nausea just don't have to know how to do that itself what is like other places to take your period of something goes wrong with it or is there enough internet like sources and things to help you with more species I might have there's something unfortunately um maybe the mayor's place there are there are local communities of people to help you certainly I would also say that uh I I'm just like for the first time this week I replaced the the hot end nozzles on my any cubic

I forget what it's called the Cubs and uh you know if you just grit your teeth and try it's it's it's it's doable it is and so when when you realize that you had to replace that hot monster segment did something had to have to go like have something hard to change it funnily no so I it comes with a brass nozzle concern with any brass manufacturing is the potential that they use lead in the manufacturable grass so a relative of mine asked can you print cookie cutters well sure so I bought food safe plastic and then I bought a stainless steel nozzle to ensure that there's there's no lead contamination so I didn't even have a problem it's uh

the eagerness to you know again like once you have one of these things you want to print print some more and anybody I mean you know if somebody says to me hey can you you know print an aircraft carrier I'll get right on it like you know you're always you know you want to print um I have I was scared of replacing the fep on my resin printer until I just buckled down and did it and I've done it a couple of times now um other things have I done that I was scared to do my elegum Mars had a problem where the the connection between the LCD and the motherboard uh the just the connector

keeps coming loose so I gridded my teeth got out my eye fix it kid opened the front sure enough there it was loose I was like go ahead so I pushed it back into place and it prints so I would say you know you know that's it like I mean you just you you just um you can do a lot of that stuff on your own but there's also you know if you pretty quickly identify a local 3D printing Community which may be an actual like 3D printing Community it also could be I don't know you just you're on a Reddit thread and a couple of people live in the Buffalo area or something like that

you know and uh yeah you probably can get help if you needed it or something into that effect but it did