Getting Started in 3D Printing

um hello everyone my name is tyler chrome piatek i am the academic technologist here for the center for online learning and innovation at camushas college um my colleague mark will be also presenting um i'll let him introduce himself when he gets up here but um so uh we're just gonna do a very quick introduction to um 3d printing today um this isn't as some of you as i i think i heard a few people uh talking about stratasys um some of you are definitely professionals uh i would call myself a hobbyist so i'm still in the beginner stages of 3d printing uh so i'm kind of hoping that this helps other people also get into the beginner stages

of 3d printing um so 3d printing let me actually do slideshow really quick just so that it's a little bit bigger uh 3d printing is basically just converting a 3d digital model or in some cases a 2d st a 2d svg excuse me into a physical model that you can hold there's a couple of different forms of 3d printing the two main consumer ready forms of 3d printing are fdm which is a fuse deposition modeling which is what we have right here and sla or resin printing which is what mark is going to be talking about and they're all part of additive manufacturing what that means is essentially that all it does is it adds to the product that you

are creating it doesn't take away any materials uh like regular um manufacturing can uh there's a bunch of different uses i've got a list here and i've also got um a house a very artsy house uh one of the first 3d printed houses called the tech club right here um but it's used a lot in research and for fast prototyping dremel tools actually used and have their own 3d printer at one point where they just made handles and tools and a bunch of other stuff out of fdm prints there's also a prosthetics and other medical devices uh recently prusa which we're using a pusa mini right here prusa actually made a call out to all makers which is

basically just their printing community to create slings and other medical devices for the war in ukraine um but it's also used in um for other medical devices uh as well as presex but anyway so we'll get past that really quick uh i've got just this really quick side of an fdm printer or the parts of the fdm printer yeah [Laughter] but it's suffice to say that there is something that heats the material which is called filament which is basically just a long string of plastic and then that heated filament gets turned into layers which then creates your 3d object the basic process is you create your or find on a 3d sharing website like thingiverse or

cult media i think is one and my mini factory uh you create it you export it as an stl file convert it into gcode using a slicer which translates it into something that the printer can understand and that slicer information has everything from how hot the printhead should get to the type of filament being used as well as where the printhead needs to be at a given time and then you just print it it sounds a lot easier than it is and i've got another slide for that in just a second there's a bunch of different programs that can be used basically any 3d object or 3d software that can export an stl or an

obj stl is preferred because it's got it the slicer can better translate the data from the stl over the obj but you can use any computer aided design or cad software um we will be using tinkercad uh which is a free software that is online and automatically saves um which is kind of a gateway to i think fusion 360 if i'm if i'm not mistaken or autocad wanted to um but you can also use autodesk maya blender a bunch of other things you can also use phone apps there are 3d modeling phone apps that you can use as well um yeah so uh this slide um i just added in like literally five minutes ago uh you don't

need to be a wizard to do 3d printing like i said you don't even have to model anything you can go to um thingiverse i think average excuse me my mini factory or some other place or even fiber and ask someone to create a 3d model for you and just get started um it's relatively cheap to get into 3d printing most printers cost anywhere most um beginner printers cost anywhere from like 300 to 500 but that's like an upfront cost you don't have to necessarily pay that again unless you want to get another printer which might be useful sometimes um but the filament is relatively cheap it's like twenty to fifty dollars per reel of one kilogram filament um and it

also depends on the type of filament that you're getting and from the manufacturer but it doesn't take a lot to get into 3d printing is essentially what i'm trying to say with this slide um so we're just gonna get started with um tinkercad uh it's free it's easy to use easy to access and because it's an online program it is it auto saves which is really great sometimes especially when you've spent three four hours on something then all the time your computer decides that it doesn't want to work anymore um and you forgot to save during that entire time all right so uh i'm just going to show off a couple of my designs that i have created

uh the first one is it's a really simple version of our lady of victory basilica and buffalo here obviously some of the dimensions are not correct and i actually have a picture of it right here some of the the dimensions of the model that i created are definitely not correct um it's also got a few other issues with it like right here um that would be taken care of by a much more robust 3d modeling software but tinkercad is just really great because it's simple is basically how that goes i also created our center for online learning and innovation logo on a plinth i have not printed this off yet so i'm not entirely sure how this is going to

work but we'll see so uh when you first get started with tinkercad like i said it's free you just need to create an account with um autodesk when you first get started it will take you through like a 20 to 30 minute introduction of tinkercad it's also got these lessons right here that you can go and get deeper into tinkercad this code blocks thing is something that i've started uh learning myself uh which kind of gets you started with coding as well as 3d modeling which is interesting but anyway so i'm just going to click on create new design

and here is your workspace you can zoom in and out select things rotate you can edit the grid right now it's set to millimeters but you can edit it so that it is um in inches or their bricks i keep it in millimeters most every 3d printer is in millimeters if you find that you're having a hard time and your computer is just being really slow or your browser rather is being really slow you can reduce it the graphical stress that's on your browser or computer by just turning off the shadows right here um so yeah i'm just gonna hit cancel right here uh you can change the snap grid uh so that you can be as very

detailed i guess with the snapping as you want but so let's get started with um bring a couple of things in on the right here you have a huge library of basic shapes as well as other shapes that people have created in tinkercad and have shared so but we'll stick with the basic shapes right now all you do is you just click on a shape that you want and drag it in to the workplane on the right here you have some of the things that you can change about the shape as soon as you get into it um like for example the radius will make it a little bit uh more curved if i can

grab that correctly there we go it can even turn into a sphere if you try and raid yourself a little bit too much um you can change the length of it i will go

i'll keep the height at 20. with that said too tinkercad is very i'm going to say widget based which is both good and bad um but as you can see if i hover over one of these widgets a number pops up i click on that and then i can click on this number and change the length of the object and then the same thing here um it like i said it's both good and bad uh it's great because there's less information uh overload hitting you in the face um but sometimes you kind of want that stuff just to make sure that you are doing things correctly to rotate an object you've got these rotate widgets right here and it's also based

on the orientation of your camera so these widgets will change and move with your camera as well which is kind of hard to understand sometimes so i'm just going to click on this

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instead i'm just going to create a really quick table right here but if anyone has any questions right now just let me know um with the tendency that i think a lot of people are seeing they're trying to move away from plastics yeah where [Music] where does 3d printing come in are they going to develop a new material to uh be a replacement or an alternative for the resin that is healing um i'm going to let mark speak about the resin but with fdm printing specifically you can that has been talked about a lot in the 3d um printing world where they have uh there are companies that actually have created uh recyclers i'm gonna call them but you

basically toss in your old prints your failed prints um your supports all that other stuff uh you toss that in and maybe some a little bit of new material but it's all it's mostly recycled material and what spits out is recycled filament so there is also open source versions of it that are cheaper you can take water bottles and do the same thing for example or pop bottles however you fancy it and it can do the same thing i do know that there are some companies that do sell recycled filament just in general and there are some companies that sell filament on plastic reels and other companies that sell it on cardboard reels so they're they're they're trying it's not

it's not there yet but they are trying so um

and i should say that i find in tinkercad i am continually i work very fast with drag and drop and then i use the you know then i enter in numbers to do fine tuning and i'm constantly messing with that snap grid um to fine-tune things because i work in very small scales so you can you can move very fast and tinker quick cad you just develop a habit of mind i suppose you know that's the case so i think uh our previous speaker who did two sessions uh brent um was talking about just how um the idea is to get you to learn the new software rather than the software itself um so that that's kind of the case with this

um autodesk views tinkercad as the uh i think i mentioned this before as well autodesk views tinkercad as the gateway to getting into autocad and fusion360 so once you've got tinkercad down it's really easy to go to those two programs and in my experience it's it it then becomes it's the gateway it could be the gateway to open source software too i mean you may you may not fulfill autodesk's original intention uh because a lot of some of the core concepts that you're working with here are simpler versions of what you can do with you know blender for instance

so

just turn this into a hole really quick and then and that's a crucial feature right there a lot of what you do in tinkercad is carve shapes using anti shapes or voids in the same shape same shaped set right uh basically any shape that you have over here on the right you can turn into a hole for example this sphere right here uh and and that's as mark was saying it's kind of like taking a lump of clay and then molding it using voids and solids um but just after like a few minutes here i've got a pretty it's not a great looking table but it is a table so uh maybe a little bit too short maybe

a a side table that you can put a ten uh an umbrella through but there we go so i was talking about that slicer earlier as well um we are using the prusa slicer with our prusa printers because it just works pretty well together uh but there's a bunch of other free slicer software out there um including but not limited to um oh gosh i was just thinking about it uh the cura slicer ultimate kakira uh which is what a lot of slices are actually based on is all to make your pura um so the the general idea behind a slicer is like i said you translate your 3d object into something that the 3d

printer can print um for the most part your your tools are going to be the exact same in every single slicer so i'm just going to import really quick that one but so normally when you export an stl or something that's not necessarily this finished product but um you don't really want to be touching it too much after that but in your slicer you can change like the size i'll grab a b so that it does it correctly very proportionally um you can change the size of it so that's bigger on the build plate which um the prusa slicer shows you a pretty decent looking uh version of the build plate uh which is what the 3d object prints on

in some cases you just get a simple work plane like you saw in tinkercad in other cases you get even more details out of the slicer than what you even have in prusa you can rotate the object um sometimes you might want to rotate it because it might make it sturdier depending on what you are looking for or it can print a little bit faster depending on how things line up i won't go through these other tools uh for most slicers you do have some basic print settings that you can just select um for example there's a bunch of presets here i've got a couple of my own here but we'll go with the 25 millimeter 0.255 millimeter draft

um supports are useful because obviously for example uh this thing right here we do have a couple of there we go we do have a couple of things that if the printer the ftm printer decided to start printing it would be printing in open air which can cause sagging or in some cases just a completely failed print so the supports prevent that from happening by building some supports that hold up that part while it's printing infill for the most part these 3d objects print hollow except i think for resin printers you can do it but it's a little bit more difficult they print hollow so sometimes you need infill to strengthen the print you can do other things to strengthen

strengthen the print like make the walls uh slightly bigger but um the infill kind of helps with that and also helps with the top layers as well when you need to cover up the infill i'm going to click on slice now and right here we have a representation of what our finished product will look like um the supports are not completely correct but i'm not going to worry about that um for the most part most slicers will tell you uh the roughly the amount of time i've learned that this is not completely correct but it is pretty close um the amount of time that you will take to print the object um prusa does a really

great job of showing you like what exactly is taking time and how much you're going to be using of um how much filament you're going to be using as you are printing each part which is kind of cool most slicers also have these little widgets here which show you basically how it's going to print which is kind of cool if you're trying to demo off a object that you are doing um and then the final thing is you just export it to g code right here and you send it to the 3d printer and then you get going um i'm gonna switch to the doc cam really quick uh yeah you can't see a whole heck of a lot

going on right now but um what we're we are printing right now is the little tree frog which the finished version of it right here so whatever yeah um yeah so uh any other questions for me um this is i guess kind of a special recording question but is um is there like a central repository for folks who do 3d printing when they can see any like limitations on what they can print or cannot print in their jurisdiction or what have you um or do any regulations like that because of just because of the way 3d printing is at least in my experience i'm sure someone else can uh speak about it a little bit more um but i there really

aren't regulations i'm i'm going to approach the subject it might be a little bit hard but um for example ghost guns 3d printed guns that don't have a serial number there's not really any regulations for or against those unless it's state by state which i'm not necessarily keeping up with but i really should we're not going to do it obviously because we're at a college and that would just be bad just in general but there really aren't any regulations that i'm aware of that prevent people from printing certain items over other items especially because a lot of 3d printers it's their personal printer it's not like they're using it for a company um uh i did see someone

yep the point do you give up on the slicer just designing and supports yourself their trade-off point you found is

yeah there have been a few times um a lot of the times um supports leave trace material when you try to take it off and honestly a lot of supports are just very difficult to take off in general so sometimes for for things that are very the the program will design the supports for you and sometimes it will put supports where there really shouldn't be supports i try to look for those because number one it lessens the amount of filament being used and also lessens the amount of time taken to print the object but for the most part i just let it do its thing um i'm sure if someone more experienced than me can definitely

go in and say yeah i need supports here here and here and that'll be it um i'm not that experienced yet but i hope that answers at least somewhat all right any other questions or cool all right i'm going to hand it over to mark then ah my name is mark gelmar i'm the director for the center for online learning and innovation um i do not have it degrees my degrees are in american history and history of technology and so i mean just sort of following on a theme that that brent touched upon um all of this is accessible to folks with a wide variety of different backgrounds who are interested in creating which is a central a sort of

ethic of of our office um i think we're gonna go with i just hit laptop laptop um so just to follow up on what tyler was saying uh i made these drawings of a 1930s 40s drill press um as if 3d printing wasn't a nerdy enough hobby i build models of world war ii stuff so that's like severely nerdy but the problem of course is that if there isn't a kit available for me to buy well how am i going to get stuff like if i want machine tools for example well 3d printing allowed me to do that um that model by the way is printed painted and is up here and it's tiny it's 1 over 35

scale um because the drawing i could scale it up to 1 over 12 scale in an instant and and i could print it at that scale if i wanted to um and so there's you know i got into this as a hobbyist um and really unrelated to my to my to my job uh before i go any further i'm gonna say some things about resin resin printing uh specifically the you know sort of the counterpart to 3d printing um and this is a pretty typical consumer resin printer an elgoo mars ii it's mine there's resin in this bottle i want to address these questions that have come up what is the moral and ethical implications of this okay so environment

firearms i will say personally my own ethic is that if i decide this would probably happen before there's laws or regulations that would limit my ability to 3d print if i decide that this is morally problematic i will stop i will not insist on my right as a consumer to make stuff if this stuff turns toxic socially or environmentally guns is one issue although i think the conversation we're having in the united states is about how easy it is to get guns of traditional manufacture maybe 3d printing is not yet anyway i'm not sure you have to resort to a 3d printer it seems pretty easy to get guns um including those of a 50 year old design

for example um not naming names the environmental one concerns me as a more immediate concern of this stuff this resin this photo polymer resin is not friendly to organics like you me and my dawn and my daughter okay a few minutes of skin contact can cause skin irritation there may be long-term health effects when it gets through your skin uh you do not want it in your eye it can cause eye damage um so you have to take precautions when using it it should never ever ever enter the environment if you're going to start 3d printing after you walk out here i beg you please do all you can to be responsible with this resin in its liquid state

uh because if we're not responsible and we create an environment and a public health crisis that none of us can do this and i'm afraid you know i don't want to situat we're look hooker chemical love canal that history is just down the road let's not create a consumer movement environmental crisis um so for example i try very very hard to make sure every resin that leaves my workbench in one way or another has been hardened into the much more benign hard state um where there's even food grade versions of it okay and i'll touch upon that a little bit um real quick the way this technology works this stuff comes in a liquid bottle

you take a step to harden it using ultraviolet light that's how the printer works i have a box here a cheat box i bought on amazon where you it's for nail polish it hardens nail polish with ultraviolet light it also hardens parts i print in my prayer finishes the curing process and then i use water and isopropyl alcohol as part of the curing process i need to remove liquid resin dripping off the part after the printer is printed okay and i'm using a water washable version of the resin you can get other resins that require more potent cleaning agents like high strength isopropyl alcohol or a lot it's part of the arcana of 3d printing

all the different chemicals that work better work best whole you know hold a lot of real estate on reddit about that topic um

so to demonstrate how a resin 3d printer works got the top off mine there's a vat there's a tub the liquid resin goes in it the bottom of it is clear it's clear plastic afterwards you can come up and take a look here is here is one of these tubs with a clear plastic bottom underneath it is an led screen quite similar to what's in your phone it may be specialized monochromatic in order to flash silhouettes of uv shapes 2d shapes which are the various layers of the print as it develops in three dimensions and so and i've got my little diagram here i think my mouse may have oh well i should have asked it nicely

um this build plate is on an elevator it comes down into the resin vat goes into the liquid resin there's a very very thin space between it and the plastic clear plastic bottom of the vat the screen underneath flashes a shape and it creates a layer and it might be 50 microns in thickness it's adjustable

and then rinse repeat the build plate comes up the screen flashes another silhouette let's see it say it's starting two columns now one obvious difference between that and this fdm printer is the whole thing's happening upside down as it's coming out of the resin bat the 3d piece of resin is taking shape ideally the uv light is coming from the screen within the printer is hardening it just enough so that it forms a nice crisp 3d object um again there'll be some post-processing involved with uv light as well to cure that up to make sure it's fully hard after you get it out of the printer but even before that let's say this print is done

you will be faced with the fact that the hard resin or semi hard resin mostly hard resin has liquid resin on it from the vat in the printer this is the biggest problem with resin printing i'll tell you up front if you walk away today and go this isn't for me this is probably why once i remove this part from the build plate i'm going to have to clean this part clean off the liquid live resin the the the um that's got monomers in it that's got photo initiators it's got all kinds of chemicals uh so then i can finish up uv curing this part and then it's done and then it's benign you can handle it and

there's examples of them up here you can come up and look at um i'm still using a really crude system of this this sort of nail polish hardening uv lamp and i've got little pieces here these are actually one over 35th scale building gutters 1940s uh you know gutters and downspout type of thing which i drew in tinkercad and you can see that like what tyler is talking about the fdm printer i need to have supports to suspend this thing upside down in space as it's printing and you have to watch out for circumstances where the part will for a variety of geometric reasons not be supported um and will fall apart um first thing my printer does is always

print a sled against the build plate so that it has a firm purchase so the part doesn't fall into the resin before it's done it doesn't fall back into the liquid resin that and so i have to clip those off and clean up the parts and i get all these parts which i could not necessarily buy commercially um you know a hydraulic jack for a car jack stands uh you know architectural details and a a 1940s drill press how did i learn about a 1940s drill press type 1940s or 1930s drill press into google and you get ads from popular mechanics magazine where they were trying to sell drill presses so all i did was went shopping for a

drill press in 1935 and that got me what i needed and i went into tinkercad and i said how can i use tinkercads tools to replicate these various shapes tackle one shape at a time okay i cheated i used a bit of brass rod from a hobby shop for the for the post rather than three because it was faster which is also another thing don't 3d print stuff you could get easily you know which is also you get a 3d printer and you're like i got 3d print my life well it may not be worth it you really want bespoke bespoke objects and this exists alongside an analog very very much analog hobby so these are from kits the canadian soldier

and the jeep uh this is xps phone you buy at home depot uh you just carve it with a pencil and then you paint it so so i'm it's this it's this mix of very traditional art very traditional craft and then this new digital technology one is certainly not replacing another um they complement one another but this is the issue safety this is a little dramatic i deliberately kind of made the picture dramatic uh scared straight i don't actually wear a respirator because in this photograph i'm just right here there's a window and i open it i put a box fan in it and i'm not smelling resin fumes so i don't feel that i'm in a in an

unsafe atmospheric condition when i'm 3d printing pro tip keep the top on the printer though when you have that vat exposed the atmosphere that's where the fumes really start to build up so get your parts out close the printer and i find that it's not too bad if you are working in a space like for example we're going to probably bring one or two of these types of printers to the campus we will then probably have a forced air hood uh and we may say to students listen you ought to wear a respirator anyway it's an institutional environment uh as well as maybe we'll do more rigorous printing whereas i'm a hobbyist i may do a couple

of prints on saturday and that's it um you always wear nitrile gloves uh vinyl and uh latex i think have problems where the resin if it gets on them it can get through them it can break them down so stick with nitrile gloves and yes you absolutely need to wear them that's that's that's um you do not want the stuff on your skin um eye pro eye protection absolutely wear that why not it's super cheap um i wear the same ones when i'm cutting my weeds it's just fine um and i wear a smock just to protect the rest of me um the workspace i work on i have silicon mats laid down you can buy them cheaply

in a variety of places slap mats um that'll stop resin from it especially it's got a little lip on it so even if you had a major spill it's contained and you can get it cleaned up without without too much danger without too much problems um and so i do this in my home i don't think i'm doing something extraordinarily dangerous um you can get the msds sheets for this resin does anybody bother getting the msds sheets for chlorine bleach you use in your home i'm not suggesting you should but my point is in in the scale if you're safe if you follow procedures you should be all right if you elect to do this and in fact that's kind of leads

me to sort of another tip um before you buy one of these things read about the process people used to print with them and even be like me like i typed in to like evernote okay here's how i would do this begin begin with the end in mind and work back what are all the steps i need to take so that i make sure i'm safe and i don't get in a situation where like i've got wet resin on gloves and now i need to open a garbage can that should not have a lid on it because i need to put things in it or something like that make a plan lay out your tools like a surgeon

and then you'll you'll just methodically work through the printing process and you'll be absolutely fine that's one piece of advice another piece of advice is when starting out um like for instance i have an elegant mars 2 printer but if you have any cubic printer that's fine too whatever the brand i recommend first of all read all the instructions you can find from the manufacturer i also bought elegant resin to start with just because i figured chances are good the advice the company gives for its resin and its own printer there's probably greater likelihood of compatibility or avoiding some type of quirky issue and then follow the instructions for the resin you go to their website you

find exposure instructions which list okay so how long should the uv light on your printer flash into the liquid resin uh to to achieve optimal hardness the the 3d printing fans they tweak all that you know those with a lot of experience will go in and see if they can lower that that exposure number for instance and they may get better results don't do that starting out just try to get some successful prints build your confidence build your experience i learned that from an analog hobby airbrushing if you're going to airbrush paint follow the manufacturer's instructions yes buy the manufacturer's thinner because that way you're operating as close as possible to what they say this is how this should work

then you can start tweaking and experimenting adding liquitex flow aid adding some other chemical something like that sometimes i'll go to reddit and i see people are like well i just bought my brand new resin 3d printer and i followed master ninja 3d printer here he uses soraya resin and then he tweaks this he tweaks that and it didn't work for me well because uh maybe she or he lives in utah and they have a very different climate you know humidity state and very different circumstances so they may get different results maybe there could be all kinds of different reasons why you're getting different results just try to follow the manufacturer's instructions to start out then you can

as you acquire experience otherwise because you want to get you want to pretty quickly get some successful prints you'll get enormous satisfaction when you do and you want that charge so that you'll keep going and just to show you a variation on tyler mentioned the prusa um slicer this is another common slicer that's used across um 3d printing in resin a chichu box and it does a lot of the same features i can very very quickly um run down the layers of this print you can see that i have supports in place to support it of course it would be upside down on the printer this actually i like to spray because it shows the potential for this stuff to go

beyond you know my little hobby tinkering so this is a replica of a dog's jawbone and a veterinary school does not need to use real bones for students on a day-to-day basis um even if they could get dogs jaw bones that were donated from dogs that passed away you know you're gonna have a problem where you've got 12 students i want them all working with an identical model because different dogs are different and may have different teeth patterns and so i want to make sure we're all talking about the same feature besides i can hand this to a student i can make a bunch of these yeah go ahead and it will okay we this is this

is i need to scale it down some um i would without even getting into that i'll just say you're looking at a couple of cents worth of resin i mean the bottle is like 30 or 40 bucks a bottle but when you actually print it's very little money and considering what it costs us i mean when i look at the printing budget for a university on paper it's gross uh the amount of money you spend on print and toner which is why i make war on paper in my day job but i could print 12 of these one for each student and tell them you can mark this up with a sharpie it's yours you know so so we all have you have 3d

models to help you study for the exam or to help you understand the anatomy of a canine of a dog you know um that are yours it's a printout to use the traditional term um and you can see i've got multiple parts on this i've got this dog jawbone and then i got pieces from my little um my little drill press resin printing by and large fem printing the bigger the object the slower the longer it's going to take to print resin printing that's true in one dimension but because an entire layer is flashed all at once instead of this thing drawing a layer over time generally one dimension slight exceptions one dimension determines how long it will take to

print something and for example with my water washable resin and my elbow mars tube it's like i don't know maybe a centimeter an hour so i set up a big long print over to print overnight and then and then come back come back in the morning um i am concerned about the environmental issues here so i'll just say lastly again if you get into this uh please the liquid resin you can put back in the bottle when you're when when you printed something you can put the remaining resin back using a paint strainer um and and please do not allow the red do not pour it down the drain but but don't do something else with it

like just throw it in the trash um if what i do is i take the trash that i generate my paper products and things like that and i just i hit him with uv light and i harden that resin um that's even going into the trash and as for i when i break away all these these uh pieces i actually save those and use them as filler in my hobby so they go i just put them in a big old bin and then i use them whenever i need some sort of fill for something so we have a printer printing here uh we have some examples over here um please come up and take a look and we'll

stick around for a few minutes if anybody's got any questions i think we're up on the lunch hour though so but absolutely we'll stick around and answer any questions you may have thank you [Applause]