3D Printing Contest

Dragon Pawn Contest Overview:

The purpose of the contest is to help us learn more about the advanced settings of 3D printing. We were given a certain chess piece and we needed to modify it to optimize the printing time, the amount of filament used and the quality of the print. I worked with Kathryn Wu.

Strategies:

1. Changed the infill density 

a. Tutorial Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLmYj8wRmwA

b. We change the whole infill density to 5% to reduce the filament and printing time

c. In order to solidify the top and bottom of the chess, we used modifiers in Object Settings to increase the partial infill density to 30%. 

2. Adaptive Layer Height

a. We tried to change the layer height. However, we found it was unnecessary to change the layer height after doing step 1.

b. Tutorial: https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/software/bambu-studio/adaptive-layer-height

3. Change the infill pattern

a. We changed the infill pattern to lightning so that it would use less filament

4. Tree Support

a. We changed the support to tree slim to reduce the filament and the printing time.

5. Z hop when retracting

a. We set that to 0 to minimize the time.

Test Printing

We were allowed to print up to 25% of the whole piece to test out the settings since we only got one chance to print the whole object.

Actual Print

Conclusion

It was a really fun contest. We did a lot of tutorials and reduced the printing time to 45mins in the use of 7g filament. The quality of our print was also good. This contest helped me learned a lot of settings about 3D printer. I figured out that if I wanted to reduce my time for 3D printing then I can change the infill density to the minimum and only strengthen the place where it would be messed up in such low infill density. Using tree support is also a good idea. Most of the times, supports are necessary for the intricacy of a print. For time reduction and decrease of filament use, it would be better to use tree support since it requires less filament therefore less time. Changing Infill patterns can also be helpful since the lightening pattern requires the least amount of filament. Based on my observation to other people's strategy, I found that changing how print layout can increase the intricacy of the print as well. After Kathryn and I printed out ours, I found that Noah Smith printed his by laying the dragon piece down. It not only decreases the amount of filament used for support but also reduced the time and made the corners of the dragon scale sharper. It was a fun experience and now I know more about 3D printing than before.