Embedded Files
For this project, we were tasked with testing our 3D printing skills through a challenge. I worked with my partner, Angelina Yang (her digital portfolio is linked here), on 3D printing a dragon chess piece. The challenge was to be in the top 10% of the class for time and to use the least amount of material while still printing the design accurately. We were assigned to use the Bambu a1 mini 3D printer. In order to save time and use less material, we were tasked with changing the settings on the 3D printer inside of the Bambu Slicer. Below are the strategies we used. We were given this STL of the dragon design.
5 Strategies Employed:
Enabling organic tree supports and only supporting critical regions (toggled)
Adjusting sparse infill (under sparse infill settings) & infill/wall overlap (under advanced settings)
Physically positioning the print closer to the origin to optimize the travel time, which took up the most time (8m21s)
Changing the initial layer height to .22mm, slightly compromising the print quality but optimizing the print time
Adjusting the initial layer height from .2 mm → .1 mm
Comparison Spreadsheet
One component of our project was thought of by my partner. She created a spreadsheet to track all of the changes and adjustments we made to the print. This way, we could look back and compare to decide what was the most efficient print and which we should use as our final print. We looked speciflay at how these changes effected the total print time and how they effected the total filament usage. We noted that travel time was the most time consuming in each iteration, followed by supports, outer, and inner walls. This became the target of our setting changes.
25% Print
We were allowed 3 tries to print the top 25% of the design with the settings listed above. We did this to see how well they worked in terms of quality, speed, and material used. We found that the speed time was optimal (~12 minutes), although there was minor stringing between the dragon’s horns. We had considered improving print quality by toggling the ‘ironing’ settings and experimenting with the concentric/rectangular settings, but in the end, we found that it produced little to no difference in the final product and simply added time.
This was the first run of our 25% print.
This was the second run of our 25% print after we had changed the initial layer height.
This is the Bambu Slicer view of the second 25% 3D print.
Final (Changed) Settings:
Layer Height: 0.20 mm - > 0.22 mm
Initial Layer Height: 0.2 - > 0.1 mm
Sparse Infill: 20% - > 10%
Sparse Infill Pattern: grid - > aligned rectangle
Infill Overlap: 15% - > 10%
Slow down for Overhangs: on - > off
Support Type: off/default - > Tree
Support Style: default - > Organic
Support Only Crit. Regs: off - > on
Top Shell Layers: 5 - > 4
Ironing: Off
The orange in the settings to the right indicate a change in the Bambu Slicer.
This is the view of the Bambu Slicer for our final print. You can see the time and filament distributions in the box on the right side.
Conclusions
The final total print time for our project was 41 minutes and 9 seconds. Our final model print time was 35 minutes and 42 seconds. Our print used 2.43 m / 7.36 g of filament with supports and 6.60 g without supports. During the print, we observed minor changes to the quality as a result of using a .22mm layer height and lower % infill, but otherwise, there was no major compromise. In this challenge, I ultimately learned a lot about advanced printing settings such as linear advance, pressure equalization, ironing, and jerk control. Understanding these concepts allowed us to streamline the optimization of the print, as well as obtain mastery in 3D printing. Overall, this challenge moved us away from a merely abstractive understanding of 3D printing processes and focused on what was happening on a more fundamental level. The link to the file of the final version of our project is here. Below are photos and videos of the printing of our final dragon chess piece for the 3D printing challenge.
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