3D Print­ing

3D printing is get­ting better and better all the time. When I was in un­der­grad for ar­chi­tec­ture, I had ac­cess to a powder-based printer in the fab lab that would pre­cisely de­posit micro droplets of a resin binder— grad­u­ally fusing layers of powder into a solid ob­ject. In my ex­pe­ri­ence, this method of printing pro­duced rather brittle prints and the res­o­lu­tion was mediocre com­pared to most modern printers.

There was also a pro­fessor, Sasa Zivkovic, who ran a studio that pro­duced a large-format, pellet-based FDM printer while I was at school. The CNC (com­puter nu­mer­ical con­trol) gantry system was even later re­pur­posed for a stu­dent's PhD on con­crete printing. This al­lowed for very large prints, but the res­o­lu­tion was lim­ited by the nozzle size and the pre­ci­sion of the gantry system.

Resin (SLA) Printing

In­terning at sev­eral ex­per­i­mental mar­keting shops ex­posed me to a va­riety of dig­ital fab­ri­ca­tion tools as well. Many of these shops did full ser­vice de­sign-build in house. The first time I got to print on a Form­Labs Form 2 resin-based SLA printer, I was blown away by the ma­te­rial en­gi­neering and the quality of the cured parts.

SLA prints have much, much higher res­o­lu­tion— a high-res­o­lu­tion screen that emits light in the UV wave­length will cure the resin against a flat translu­cent pane at each layer. So, con­trary to FDM, the print is lifted from the print sur­face.

Even com­pared to modern FDM (fused de­po­si­tion) printers with fine nozzle gauges, SLA often ex­cels in speed and quality. How­ever, the resins are toxic and messy to work with. Post-pro­cessing is re­quired to fully cure the prints, and sup­port struc­tures must be care­fully re­moved.

Fil­a­ment (FDM) Printing

FDM printing has come a long way, es­pe­cially in re­cent years. These printers are gen­er­ally more af­ford­able than resin printers, and the ma­te­rials are less toxic and easier to work with. The most common fil­a­ments are PLA (poly­lactic acid) and ABS (acry­loni­trile bu­ta­diene styrene). PLA is biodegrad­able and easier to print with, while ABS is more durable and heat-re­sis­tant.

Slicing Soft­ware

There are sev­eral pop­ular slicing soft­ware op­tions avail­able for preparing 3D models for printing. Some of the most widely used in­clude:

• Cura
  A free and open-source slicer de­vel­oped by Ul­ti­maker. It of­fers a user-friendly in­ter­face and a wide range of cus­tomiza­tion op­tions.
• PrusaSlicer
  De­vel­oped by Prusa Re­search, this slicer is op­ti­mized for Prusa printers but works well with other models too.
• Sim­pli­fy3D
  A paid slicer that of­fers ad­vanced fea­tures and fine-tuning op­tions for ex­pe­ri­enced users.
• Or­caSlicer
  A newer slicer that has gained pop­u­larity for its speed and ef­fi­ciency.

I've pri­marily used Cura for my prints, as it strikes a good bal­ance be­tween ease of use and ad­vanced fea­tures.

Bench­marking

One of the most pop­ular models for bench­marking 3D printers is the Benchy . This small boat model is de­signed to test var­ious as­pects of a print­er's per­for­mance, in­cluding over­hangs, bridging, and sur­face finish. Printing a Benchy can help iden­tify any is­sues with your print­er's cal­i­bra­tion and set­tings.

If you're like me and have a small tod­dler, it can also double as a fun toy!