Random Musing About 3D Printing

Super annoying printing problems

I haven't really written about how I got a Bambu Labs A1 Mini for Christmas a few years ago and finally got into 3D printing (maybe someday I'll expound on this). But anyway, I recently had some frustrating printing issues and was wondering what the hell was going on, hypothesizing that maybe the things (my husband's original designs for ink advent sets) I was printing needed to be redesigned to be less fussy to print. I tried a bunch of different filaments, including Bambu's own filaments which are best calibrated for their own printers. And yes, the Bambu filament printed pretty cleanly. But they don't carry all the colors and finishes (glittery, translucent) I want to play with. So I was getting really annoyed that filaments I wanted to use were being annoying.

Finally I revisited a dark green shimmery filament that I've used before, and it printed SO CLEANLY, I felt such a wave of relief! Phew...

Tying it in to fountain pens...

It occurred to me that this is kind of like finding fountain pen inks that work well with the nib type on your fountain pens. If you have a dry writing nib, you learn that wetter inks work best, and vice-versa. Shimmery inks don't universally work in nibs due to the particles, so you figure out which of your pens work okay with shimmer. And of course, the 3D printer is pushing melted material through a nozzle that can be different sizes, so the analogy seems appropriate. I've also seen warnings about using shimmery filament in narrower nozzles, since the glitter/shimmer particles can clog them.

I've been burned

All this to say that now I'll have to seek out filaments that print without fuss, and scrutinize the filaments I have now. I also need to do more calibration prints to dial things in.

Because I'd had some pretty easy prints before, it didn't really occur to me that filaments could vary so greatly in printing performance. I thought that my little printer was so good at printing that it didn't matter. I didn't have a lot of the issues that my husband was running into with his printer – no "spaghetti" prints, no problems with warping or having the print peel off the build plate, no real print quality issues for detailed prints. But a lot of the time I was printing models from Makerworld, where people are pretty good at providing print profiles that work well on Bambu printers (obviously). I did print some prints from third-party sites that worked pretty well, so I thought my printer was bulletproof. Oh, how naive... 😆

Consistency? I don't know her

The variance in filaments, even among different types from one brand, makes it difficult to hone in on filaments that work best with my printer, though. With fountain pen inks, performance tends to be more consistent within brands (always some exceptions) that it's easier to say, "oh Pilot Iroshizuku inks are usually wet, so use them in drier nibs," or, "Troublemaker inks tend to be dry," "Diamine is generally well-behaved," etc.

I found out that while the dark green shimmery filament from Ziro 3D prints exceptionally well, another glitter filament from this brand (a translucent purple with iridescent shimmer) gave me A TON of problems that I hadn't seen before, like poor first-layer print quality, despite being really, really pretty. (I might want to retry printing with it now that I've dialed in a few speed parameters; that's how pretty the filament is and how much I want it to work!)

So yeah, I just learned what more experienced 3D printing hobbyists know: you gotta do some calibrating for each filament you want to print with. It's not like with an inkjet printer where you calibrate once and can kind of get away with not recalibrating when you replace a cartridge. Variance is such that you can't assume that even the same filament that was fine before is still fine now. Plus if filaments absorb too much moisture from the air, that can affect performance also. This kind of fiddliness put me off 3D printing for a long time. But a lot of these things have been ironed out, and newer printers than mine have improved so much, including having multiple toolheads (I pine over the Snapmaker U1) to make multi-color or multi-filament printing easier and less wasteful.

I'm rambling now. I just wanted to mention that finding filaments that print well on my printer reminded me of how great it can be to find fountain pen inks that flow well in certain pens. 🙂 Thanks for reading! Also, if you have any filament brand recommendations, please send them my way. I know I've barely scratched the surface of what's out there.