3D Printer Recommendations

i do have a question those of you that own printers did you go to school for similar fields like cad, cnc etc. or do you use the printers for business i have some items i want to print off thingiverse that need some modification which i cant even figure out how to alter the stl file so i dont know if 3d printing is for me

Just watch YouTube tutorials on Fusion 360 or similar. You can learn the basics pretty quickly. But 3D printing in general is never plug and play, it always requires time and dedication.

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Learning CAD is easy, fusion360 is free and there are plenty of tutorials on youtube. Once you get a printer and you get excited about the hobby, learning some basic CAD will be worth it.

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Ah yeah prusa gang :muscle:

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Prusa the second. the frame warps like a fucker in the night. Under 2 mm is ok. 1,7 mm actually

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You mean the frame warps that much due to temperature change?

Modifying stl in f360 is really hard, often harder than recreating the model from scratch. Try tinkercad. It deals with stl much better (but I find precise manipulation difficult).

F360 is easy relative to other 3d cad, but it is not easy at all for first time cad people. Autocad’s free training is good. It’ll take a long time to get comfortable.

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I had zero cad experience in school. When I got my first big boy job, the lead engineer was kind enough to teach me. He realized how important of a skill it is to have and made me rebuild our entire detector from scratch while going through solidworks tutorials.

I’m starting my son into basic CAD lessons asap. It is the most satisfying and relaxing process figuring out how to shape something.

Modifying stls suck. It’s like trying to edit a word document that is pre-formatted and locked to the extreme. Feel free to pm me if you get hung up. I don’t use fusion or autocad but they’re all similar enough programs.

Take the time and learn, it’s worth it times a million.

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Yea editing stls in Fusion sucks hard. Always use Brep or you are fucked. And I like the timeline feature.

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I didn’t know that was a thing. I just recreate the entire thing again and work on it.

I didn’t use it yet, but thingiverse has this remix feature. How does it work then? Most things don’t provide CAD files, so for a remix one has to use the stl files, right?

Yeah yeah yeah well you’re great at cad, I’m only proficient.

I only do it if it’s something basic to modify, like adding some surface or cutting a bit. Otherwise I agree, worth it to remake it.

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Remix is just people uploading designs based on other designs. There is a feature though, Customize. The item has a openSCAD file, which programmatically (text) describes a 3D model, and thingiverse is able to customize parameters against the openscad model. If you use the customizer, frequently (always?) the result is auto-uploaded as a remix.

Often you can get away with projecting a surface onto a sketch, then extruding/cutting. Much less effort. There’s one super useful trick with circles and stl imports. You can use a 3 point circle off the mesh to recreate the exact circle, which will also let you find exact center.

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Late to the party but I’ll throw in for Prusa MK3. I tried the cheapo Chinese knockoffs and pulled my hair out. Prusa is a bit more but totally worth it in hassle. Believe it or not my choice of design software is Blender. Huge learning curve but also worth it.

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I fear Blender. :slight_smile: Is STL editing possible/easy in blender?

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Sort of. Depending on the geometry you can import and STL then clean it up and save/edit as a Blender file. There are a ton of add ons that take some tedium away.

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Yah I learned 3d things first tinkering in borrowed copies of 3dsmax but only had one class in blender. If you can learn some hot keys and are doing changes in terms of percentage size change then it isn’t bad really. Quick primer

Select the object with right click

Hit tab - to enter/exit editing mode for that selected object
(Below hot keys assume mouse cursor is over the 3d viewport)
Hotkey - Description

A - to toggle select all/none whenever
B - for box selection to drag a box around some points to select them
C - for fuzzy selection can adjust ring of selection around cursor with the mouse wheel
S - scale the selected objects (press X Y or Z while in scale mode to lock to an axis or shift+X Y or Z to exclude one axis and type a number to scale, for example 0.9 for 90%, applies to grab and rotate as well)
G - Grab the selected part and move it, left click to confirm, right click to cancel
R - Rotate

If modelling from scratch for mechanical stuff parametric modelling kills it since you can fix mistakes you made early in design without redoing everything or breaking things and it’s just easier but I occasionally use blender to fix a STL I don’t have the source for or isn’t easy to recreate.

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Been printing for 2 plus years. I had the Monoprice maker select plus. Good printer but wanted something new. Just got the Evnovo (Artillery) Sidewinder X1 for about a month now. Works perfect. highly recommended.

Check out this youtubers review:

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So you can edit part and also accurately adjust dimensions (with and addon)? Because when I use blender I cant set any dimensions.