Additive Manufacturing: Troubleshoot 3D Prints

- [Joan] Hello and welcome to our course that'll teach you how to troubleshoot your 3D prints. Getting the best quality 3D prints requires that the printer itself, the materials, and the geometry of what you're printing are all setup consistently. When one or more of these things are off, it can be tricky to tease out what's going on. In this course, we'll lay out for you some systematic ways of debugging your issues. I'm Joan Horvath. Mitch Cameron and I will be talking to you alternately during the course. We have a two-person company, Nonscriptum LLC, which teaches people how to use 3D printers.

I'm trained as an engineer and spent some time as an actual rocket scientist before becoming an entrepreneur. - [Rich] I'm Rich Cameron. I'll be driving the mouse and the screenshots during this course and as Joan mentioned, we worked on the scripts together. I designed some of the earliest RepRap machines which evolved into the consumer 3D printers of today. My online name is Whosawhatsis and if you're getting seriously into 3D printing, you'll likely see me on various forums where I help people learn how to use open-source hardware and software. - [Joan] In this course, we'll talk about things that commonly go wrong with 3D printers that use filament.

First we'll talk about problems that come up because the print is not sticking to the print bed. Because putting out too little or too much plastic for the conditions and other similar issues that are caused by combinations of several factors. - [Rich] Next, we'll go over some problems caused by material properties, followed by issues caused by parts with particular geometries. - [Joan] We'll wind things up with some discussion about how a 3D printer software can either cause problems or make your life easier. We'll also give you some tips about keeping track of what you're changing as you try debugging your prints. This course teaches you about how to diagnose what might be going wrong when your 3D prints just are not coming out as you want them to.

We want to teach you what we've learned about making 3D prints as awesome as possible. We look forward to telling you about it.