Just got or thinking about getting your first 3D Printer? You’ve come to the right place. This article is to help new 3D Printer users go from unboxing to slicing to printing their created or downloaded models. We’ll also be checking out the all new Flashforge Creator Max 2.
Hi, there I’m Nils and welcome to the 3d printing zone. In this article, we’re going to be doing basically a 3d printing 101 course. For those of you just getting started, we’re going to walk you through unboxing and getting your first printer set up. Then we’ll get the software set up on the computer and then we’ll help you to print your first 3d printed models. Now, most 3d printers out of the box will come with pretty much everything that you need to get started. But just in case you want to make sure that you have everything that does come with it. You want to make sure that you have a laptop or a desktop computer, and that could be a Mac, a PC Linux, other varieties, Chromebooks sometimes will work, but typically if you’ve got a PC or a Mac, you’re going to be in good shape.
You might want to have a beverage of choice on hand. Cause this could take a little while and then you’ll just need something to open everything up with. Now. Every printer comes with a different assembly status. Some of them are completely just parts and you have to spend 12 or 14 hours putting them together, but more commonly nowadays you get printers that are either fully assembled or just require putting a few parts together that takes, you know, 30 to 60 minutes. In my case, this is a brand new Flashforge Creator Max 2. This is a brand new printer. They’ve just released it. And we’ll use this to show you all the cool things that you can do as you get started. So let’s open this one up and see what we’ve got. Now, as I mentioned before, every 3d printer is going to have some different setup instructions.
So be sure to follow along with the instructions that come with your printer. In my case, I’ve got some unpacking to do. They did a great job at making sure that everything was really solid for the shipment. And then once I’ve got everything unpacked and loosened up, then it’s a matter of installing my two print heads using four screws each. And then from there, I get to put on my spindle holders for my material that goes on the back as well as the tubes. Now this is a direct drive system. So those tubes are really just to feed it into the print heads. And then once I’ve got those done, I’m just tightening everything up on the inside. And then this 3D printer should be ready for me to try out.
Now, once you’ve got your printer all set up and everything is properly installed and ready to go, the next thing you want to do before you try to print anything or move things around too much is to power it on and to level the bed for the first time. Now, in most cases, the instruction manual that comes with your printer will have everything you need to walk you through that step by step. But in case you have any questions, always feel free to download the manual for your specific printer from their website. Okay, we’re going to go ahead and power this on for the first time.
Here we go. Now your display might be the kind that has a knob or some dial pad, like a D pad button set up. It might be a touch screen like this one, whatever it is, walk through those settings to get yours leveled for the first time. Nice little jaunty jingle there. Alright, so the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to feed the filament through to make sure ideally when you level your printer for the first time, we’re really any time you want to do that with filament loaded, and then you want to make sure those hot ends are nice and cleaned off. So we’re to start by, let’s go to tools, filament, and load. So that’s for the left extruder. So it’s going to load this one up or heat this one up running through its first tests. And typically when you receive your printer, it will have gone through some quality control at the factory where it was made.
And so it was likely used to print in the past. So this won’t be its first time, but maybe the first time with a consumer running it. So it’s definitely working. I’m going to say done, and then I’m going to do Oh yeah. Cause it just stopped. And I’m going to do the same thing with the right extruder. All right. And as you can see over here, the blue is coming out in a nice little pile as well now, so this one is ready to go. So I’m going to hit done and go back and now we’re ready to move on to our leveling. So again, just follow the instructions that came with your printer to level it for the first time, once your extruder or extruders have been ready, many printers will come with what’s called a leveling card. And if it doesn’t come with one, you can typically just use a standard sheet of letter paper. So this level card is helpful when you want to go to adjust the height of the bed, which we’re going to do right now. And I’ll just show you how this works. So it’s going to move one of the heads into the middle of the bed.
[Inaudible]
And then I’m going to insert this card here. So with the leveling card, as I put it in right now, it’s really snug. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to tighten the screw a little bit, which will pull the bed down. So if I can remember how to do this the right way, go this way. Okay. And eventually it gets pretty loose like this, where it can move back and forth really easily. So I’m just going to adjust slightly, loosening it up a little bit until it starts to snug in pole care, right there it’s grabbing on, which is just what I want. It’s not, it’s not going to hold it steady in place or lock it from moving, but it’s just going to grab it just enough that you can feel it pulling against it. And that’s perfect.
[Inaudible]
Now we’ll go through and do this usually on your bed. It will go through all four corners and possibly the center as well. It just depends on the printer. Now that we’ve got the new printer leveled and we’ve tested out that the filament is coming out of the hot end, just like it should. We’re ready to try, try out our first model on this. So if you usually look on the SD card or micro SD card, in fact, I’ll show you this one, this one comes, this is a pretty big one. Considering how big they normally are. This is a 16 gig SD card. And so a lot of times there will be test files on here. So I’m going to pop this in and I’ll go to print. And then it shows the SD card here, click on that. And then here’s test files right at the bottom.
So if I click on that, okay, I’ve got a few, I’ve got a Moai which uses both colors. It looks like, and again, this is yours. Most printers only print one color. This one happens to do two. So it’s got a two color version there. It’s got a benchy, which is probably the most common test print that you can do. It’s a small boat and it tests different things like overhang and your quality of your wall builds and different things like that. And then we’ve got a test hook in there as well. So I would normally just go ahead and print. One of these. These are calibrated for your machine. These are ready to go out of the box. You don’t have to configure anything. They should just work. And to try that out, what I’ll show you here is we’ll do a benchy and it’s going to show me all of my statuses for the bed, the left extruder and the right extruder.
In this case. Now on most printers, they will heat up your platform or your bed before they heat up the extruder. Now, this thing is often running. It’s printing a couple of benches and this is the first try and it’s doing pretty well. We’ve got one in blue on the right side here. And one on, in white on the left side. At this point, we now have our first successful 3d prints from the 3d printer, which is pretty exciting. I’ve got my two benches, one in blue, one in white in this case, from the creator max to here. If you’ve got a successful print, then you’re on your way. If you don’t stick around to the end we’ll, we’ll, we’ll talk about some troubleshooting tips for how to get a successful print or diagnose what went wrong. Now, at this point, we’re going to move on to how do we print our own models either that we’ve designed or downloaded from the internet. And the first thing we need to look at is slicer software.
I’m going to provide a brief explanation of slicers. There’s really way too much to cover in any one article, but I’ll show you what you need to get started. First, let’s talk about what slicers are. So slicing software is basically the process by which you take a 3d model, typically a dot S T L, which stands for stereolithography file. And you’re going to take that and convert it into individual layers that a 3d printer can read and understand. There are lots of different 3d printing, slicer, softwares out there. A lot of them are free and they are a very inequalities prices and everything else just like you’d expect. One thing I really love about the flash-forward series is it actually does come with flash print its own proprietary 3d printing software that allows you to load in your printer, ready to go out of the box.
And it has all of its settings and everything configured. And it just makes it really easy. In that case, the same company that produces the hardware also produces the software. So they work really well together. Probably the most common software out there for 3d printing slicers is called Cura and it’s made by Ultimaker. Now Kira has a ton of different settings. It’s totally free to download just like flash print is, and you can really do whatever you need to do with it. So I’m going to show you both of those. So you can see a little bit of a side-by-side comparison and see that there are some that are consistent across both those two software sets and really across probably any other software slicer that you’ve come across. So here we have the flash print slicer software. This is something you can download. If you just do a quick Google search for a download flash print, for example, you’ll be able to find this for whatever operating system you happen to be using.
I’m on a Mac here and I’m going to go to my printer. So if I go to print and machine type, I can select from the pre-installed flash forge printers here. So I’m going to go to the creator, max two, which is the one that we’ve got right here with us today. And then I can load a file. So I’m going to go grab from the downloads, the bolt that we just downloaded. So let’s just do the bolt by itself. I’ll say open, it’s going to place it right here. These squares that you see, these rectangles are the actual volume of the print bed. So we know exactly what it can and cannot print. And so let’s take a look at some of the settings. So if I go to print, I can just specify what my materials are. It’s got one for the right extruder, as well as the left, and then whether or not I want supports now supports are what would typically go, let me cancel out of here and show you this. If I had an extreme angle and we’ll show you on another model in just a minute, but we’ll show you when you should use supports. And when you shouldn’t as a general rule, if you can get away without using supports, your print is not only going to be faster, but it’s also going to be easier to clean up afterward.
So right now I’ve got supports disabled. They’re really not necessary on a print like this because there’s no severe angles or overhangs. We have to worry about, I don’t need a raft on this. And if you’re curious about rafts, we’ve got some other videos that talk a little bit about that. I am going to put it on high speed or sorry, high quality, which is a little bit slower. And that just means that it’s going to make smaller layers. So giving more detail and more intricacy to the print itself, I’m going to leave a brim on here. And that just means it’s going to lay down a small layer, a set of layers around the bed and attach those to the model to help hold it in place. Yeah, anything that’s kind of taller and doesn’t have a wide base it’s ideal to use a brim for that. Otherwise you can use a skirt or other adhesion methods for the bed.
So layer height in this case, it’s defaulted because I have it on a high to 0.1, two millimeters. That’s the thickness or the height of the first and each additional layer that’s going to be printed. And so that’s a pretty high quality. If I go low, for example, it’s going to change that to 0.3 millimeters. So almost three times as tall, meaning a lower resolution, but because this is an item that’s threaded and works with another part, I’m going to leave it at a higher quality. You can also go hyper and it goes 0.08. I really never need that. But if you’re doing something really intricate, you have that option. Shells just means how many consistent or solid walls do you have around the outside of it? And so most printers have a 0.4 millimeter extruder nozzle, and that hot end or nozzle means that if you’ve got 0.4 millimeters, and this has three shells, you multiply the shell number times, your diameter or your opening of your hot ends. So 0.4 times three, which will give you 1.2 millimeter thick walls on it. And then in this case, it’s going to do four layers, which are at that 0.12, which is our layer height. So the top and bottom are based on layer height. So this will do four times the 0.12 for both the bottom and the top. So it should be about just under a half a millimeter for that.
All right. And then on our infill here, this is how solid do you want your material to be? So this case, it says 20%. And we’re going to use that 20%, which will be just fine in the recommendations in Thingiverse. It actually suggested that this would be 100% infill. And if you’re going to use this for something structural, or actually try to leverage the full engineering capacity of this, this bolt and a nut, then yes, I would go 100%. But I think 20% will be fine for what we’re doing here today. And then there’s different patterns you can select that, go inside the infill. And those, again, lots to explain. There are lots to go through, but for the most part, any of any of those will work pretty well. Some have better advantages than others, but we’re going to leave it at hexagon for now.
Now with speed. This is a great area to look at for troubleshooting in this case, flash print knows the speeds that work best for its own printers. So I’m going to leave this at 50 millimeters a second and travel meaning when it’s not actually printing, but just moving from place to place for the head. It’s at 70 millimeters per second. So neither of these are particularly fast, but I think they’ll do the job and on a smaller print like this, it should still knock it out pretty quickly. And again, temperature, we’ve got it set to PLA and it will already know what to do there. If I change this to PETG, for example, it’s going to know to adjust both the bed or platform temperature, as well as the extruder temperature. I’m going to put this abs for example, we’ll do a different temperature set.
So it kind of knows exactly what needs to be done for each one. So I’ll leave it as it was for the PLA settings. And then additionally, you can check out whether or not you want the cooling fan on in this case, we definitely do want it on and you can pause it at certain Heights for changing filaments, things like that, which we do not need to do right now. So I’m going to leave everything kind of, as it is, I’ll put that back to high. Cause it reset when I changed the filament type and leave everything as it is there and then I’m going to hit. Okay.
So for the most part, if you’re getting started, you can do a lot of this just with the default settings. Now what’s cool is you’ll notice that the picture has changed here. Oops, let me slow down here. And it looks a little more granular. You can actually see the individual layers that are going, how this gets printed. So each one of these is a sliced layer, so there’s one layer right there. And so you can see the details that it will use to actually reproduce this on the 3d printer. Now, if I go back and hit print and if I go to hyper and say, okay, now our layers are a little bit more intricate, little more fine. If I go back and change that to a course or the lower, faster setting and hit, okay, you’ll see a big difference. Okay. Way less quality here.
And this is known as the printer resolution or the printer quality. And so for a lot of your prints that don’t require some sort of interaction with other pieces. Then as 0.3 millimeter, even though it looks really bad when we’re ways zoomed in like this, when you pop out a little bit like this, you can see that’s actually not bad. So that is an option a lot of the times to do a 0.3 millimeter setting. So I’m going to go because this one does require a little more detail. We’ll put it back to a high quality and hit okay there.
And now as we zoom in, it should be back to where it was the first time we looked at it, here we go. So a better quality, and I can see that these threads are pronounced enough that this should work. So that’s a kind of quick crash course in the settings for your slicer, with this ready to go, I’m going to hit export G code and for flash forge printers, it uses what’s called the dot GX file extension. Most of the printers out there are you going to use a dot G-code file and we’ll show both of those. So I’m going to save that. Okay. So this is ready to go. So now I can pop that onto my SD card and put it in the printer and try it out. Now, before we do that, you can see up here, it does give us an estimate of about 27 minutes of print time.
And it uses about a half meter of PLA I wanted it to also show you Kira. So with Kira, this is again is probably one of the most popular softwares for doing 3d printer, slicing it is free, and it’s really easy to add your printer to it. So I can say add printer. And it has a pretty good library of different printers in here that are loaded with the software itself. So I can add a non-network printer since I don’t have one connected to the network itself. This will just be via SD card right now. And as you scroll through here, you can see there are a lot of different manufacturers that have supports all kinds of things in here, which is nice. And one of the ones that we will install just as a sample here for you today. So if we go back up to towards the top, let’s look at creativity.
Very common printer is the ender model, for example. So let’s say we want to put an Inder three pro in there. It will give it the name, which you can change here yourself if you’d like to or customize that. And then when you hit add, it takes you to the settings. So you can verify that these are all correct, but it knows the settings for these individual. These are called printer profiles that are set up in here. So out of the box, it should work just with what’s given here. You can even see that the diameter of the material is set in here. It’s got one extruder in that case and it’s ready to go so I can hit next. And there it is. So there, we have an ender three pro on the screen. If you already have an STL file, you can go ahead and use that, but I’m going to go get one online.
I’m going to open up a new tab and I’m going to navigate to think averse.com. If you haven’t heard of thingiverse.com, it is a free, massive online collection of 3d models. So as you can see right away, we’ve got this whole slew of really cool items. I think it would be kind of fun to print some of these nuts and bolts. So I just click on that and a few things to note in Thingiverse. You’ve got a lot of options here. So first of all, we can download the files here. We’ll start with that. So I’m going to download the files. Give me about five seconds before it pulls it into a zip file down here. So let me show you a couple of things that you’re going to want to take a look at. I can hit like here, so that that will save to my liked files or liked models.
And then I can scroll through the different images here. If the author has uploaded different images, you’ll see those. And if they’ve got different files, all of the files will be represented here. And another really cool thing is you can actually go in and say, I want to see this in 3d. So I’ll click on that and load. And then I can spin that around and see this object in 3d right in my browser. Very cool. I’m going to exit out of that. The other thing you’ll want to keep an eye out for here is you’ve got comments. A lot of times the comments are really helpful with settings or what’s worked or not worked. And then typically you’ll have print settings of some sort listed here. So this requires no raft, no supports. These ones were printed at 100% infill. And then there’s some notes here as well. So we can try this out. So with that downloaded, I’m going to click on it and we’ll unzip this file here.
There it is. And then inside here, we’ve got a couple of things. So we’ve always got the same set of files here. And one of them is the actual files folder. The images we’ll just include whatever images were shown in Thingiverse here. So they should look familiar and then I’m going to go to files. And then I’ve got each of the dot S T L files that I can use. And these are the files that I want to bring into Kira. I’m going to go and open up in the top left and let’s go to downloads and grab the same file. So there’s the bolt 25 by eight and notice the dot STL file type. So I’ll hit open and it will place it right in the middle of the bed. Okay. So I’m going to scroll down to zoom in, hold down, shift key, and then click and drag off the bed in order to move.
And then there, I can use, if I hold down the control key on my Mac, then I can click and drag around to change my perspective. Okay. So I can zoom in, see the details here pretty well. All my settings for the printer are here in the step settings dropdown. So I’m going to click on that and out of the gate, you’re going to have these settings. I’ve reset this back to what you should see if you’re installing this for the first time. And there’s a lot more of that you can add in here, which is really convenient. So again, we can’t go over all of these, but just like we saw in flash print, your layer height is your quality, you know, your resolution essentially for the printer. This one’s a 0.2. So I’ll change that to 0.1. Okay. And then your wall thickness.
This is again, your shells, just like it says here. And again, there’s a lot more details you can go into, but we’re going to keep it fairly high level just to get you up and running here in field. Just like we looked at before, this is how solid, how much infill is actually going inside the model itself. We can change this to 100% if we wanted to. And I’m going to leave it at 100% for just a second to slice this and show you the time difference that it takes. Even on a really small little thing like this, this is a really tiny print. So we’ll leave this at line. We can do any, any number of these here that we want to do so we can do cross 3d, whatever. So material it’s going to set this again because it’s PLA it’s going to try to do this at 200 degrees and 60 degrees for the bed, which again is pretty decent.
I like to 10, typically for the hot end, I find that works really consistently. And then our print speed is defaulting to 50. And notice here, it doesn’t give you very many print options out of the box, but you can add all of those yourself. If you’d like, then we have retraction, which just means the ability for the printer to retract the PLA or the material, the filament while it’s moving along so that it’s not stringing as much. So if you’re taking a lot of seeing a lot of stringing, then you might want to adjust your retraction settings. And again, there’s just a lot. We can go into there, but we’re going to just right now, just leave retraction enabled and we’ll leave it at that print. Cooling is super important. And what this means is the fan is going to turn on and it’s going to try to cool the filament, right, as it comes out of the nozzle.
And when we have these little overhangs like this, where it’s, instead of being able to just stack on top of itself vertically, it’s actually got to hang out over the previous layer. This is where the fan is really important. If you don’t have cooling turned on, then it’s really going to struggle to do these sorts of overhangs. If you do, sometimes you can get some pretty amazing results with it and we’ll leave that fan speed at a hundred percent, again, something adjustable. And then lastly is support. And again, we’ll talk about another model in just a minute that shows you when it would be a good example of using support. Whereas in this one, we’re just not going to need it. There’s nothing that we’re going to need to print some temporary supports in order for this model to be successful. We just don’t need it in this case.
So we’ll go with a brim in this case. And then it’s giving me, giving me options for dual extrusion, but the ender three pro for example, does not have a dual extruder like this flash forge does. So there’s no options there. So if we slice this, it should give us a pretty quick result here. Okay. So it’s going to take one hour. Exactly. It’s going to take two grams or 0.71 meters of filament in order to do this at 100% in infill. If I change this back to 20, let’s see what a difference it makes.
Okay.
And now it’s basically halved the time and the material. So 32 minutes, one gram 0.4, two millimeters of material. So you can see the infill has a huge impact on time and material. So you’ve got to be considerate of what you actually need out of your infill. So, because this is not a structural piece, this is just something we’re doing. As an example, I’ll leave it at 20. We could honestly go lower than that and still be fine. And I think we’re okay. So I’m going to hit save to file
And we’ll save this off. Okay.
So those are some of the basics of Kira. Another thing that’s really important to know is that you can actually go into these gear icons here, and that will take you into your settings. So basically it allows you to turn on or off different settings. And when you click on the gear for infill, it will take you directly to the infill section here. So I can say, I actually want to be able to control my infill Y offset my line multiplier. I can turn any of these on. So if I do this, if I connect infill polygons, you can see it just added it over here in my printer settings. And there are so many you can actually do advanced here, and that will check a whole bunch of these and turn them on. And that might be a good place to start.
If you go back to basic, it’s going to give you what it came with out of the box. You can do expert, and it’s going to give you even more. Now you can see the scroll bar just got way small over here. So you’ve got a lot of options. It’s got I, that, that checked a lot of them, not everything, but most of them, but you can see, there are hundreds of settings that you can adjust here, which is at the same time, really convenient as well as super daunting. So this is something that just takes some time to get used to and see. What’s what, so I’m going to go back to advanced for this case. I’ll use quite a few of these, but even, even myself, after doing this for years, I won’t use all of these settings most of the time. So I’ll close that. And you got a lot of options here that you can play with. Keep in mind. There’s always, as you hover over them, you’ve get a little explanation that shows up a description and often some examples. And then you can always hit the reset button here to go back to what it defaults to out of the box.
Okay. So now we’re just going to print that from the SD card. So that print go through our SD card, and now we have the arrow showing your other files, but actually a couple of them on here. So we’re going to see this one here. It’s got a picture of it. So we’ll click on that and tell it to print. So the first thing it’s going to do is make sure that our bed is up to temperature. It’s setting the bed right now. It’s holding it, basically saying, making sure it knows where each of the extruders and the bed are positioned at. And then it’s going to heat everything up, both hot ends and then the bed as well. And then let’s start with the bed and then it should start the print.
Now, just like we saw in the slicer software, it’s basically going through and adding one layer at a time. And then it moves the bed down that 0.1, two millimeters and prints the next layer. Also at the bottom, you can see it’s printed a raft and the raft is actually really easy to remove. So there’s the finished product. And to remove that raft, all we need to do is just peel that off at breaks away pretty easily. Now you do have the option of using either a sharp blade or some sandpaper to remove that raft. It comes off pretty clean and leaves a nice finished product.
Now that we’ve successfully printed this little bolt, we can now take a look at something a little more complicated that involves a couple of changes to our settings. We’re going to print a little baby Yoda, and I’ve already printed one out for you to see right here. And this one, I like this one as a model to show you, because it’s got a couple of things we’re going to need to change. We’re going to set a fairly low infill on this, maybe 15, even 10%. And then you can see in the arms here, it’s got some real overhang, something that’s going to be really difficult. And in the case of his little right hand, something that’s not really possible to do with out doing support. So I’m going to show you support. We’re going to try a tree structure of support, but I’ll show you a couple of other options that you have with that as well.
So we’re back here in the flash print slicer software. I’m going to load the baby Yoda file that I grabbed just a little bit ago from Thingiverse. And let’s do baby Yoda version 2.2 dot S T L. So I’ll open that STL file and we can see here, we’ve got a pretty decent size model. So we’ve got a lot of options with the model selected. I’m going to go to scale and I want to change this. This is uniform scaling. So if I change any of these, it’ll change all of these. Let’s try this at 50%. And as soon as I hit tab, it’ll scale it down. Notice that keeps it, made it to the bed here. So it’s going to keep it stuck on the bed in the right height. So it’s not floating in the air or anything like that. That’s pretty common to most slicer software. And then if I need to, I can also move it around by dragging it like this. Or I can use the X, Y, and Z coordinates to do that as well. I can also just hit on-platform to make sure it stays on there. And there’s some other options as well, as far as rotation, I can cut just a piece of it. And over here I can select which extruder
To use. My left extruder actually has the white filament. So I’m going to set that and this should be ready to go. What I’m going to do next here, though, is to add some supports. We zoom in here. You can see there’s really no way for this right hand in particular and the left one for that matter to be able to print without some sort of support underneath it, to hold it up, it would just be printing in thin air, which is not possible. So I’m going to click supports and I have different support options here. So I can do tree-like or linear. I’ll show you both of these, and I’ll show you this and Cura as well since that’s the software that a lot of people will be using. So overhang threshold is what are the angles at which the printer can actually successfully print without support the higher, this number, the less support it’s going to have.
And typically I can go anywhere from 70 to 75% without supports, but just to show you what this will look like, I’m going to do 55. I’ll leave it there. So if I just say, okay to this and then do auto supports, it’s going to do some calculations down here and process this. And it’s going to come up with a set of little tree-like structures that will support right off of the printer itself. There we go. So none of these are actually touching the build plate. They’re just touching the model and that will help. As you can see down here, let’s take a look here inside there. It’s got some in here to hold up his hand and then over here on this side, same thing to hold up that hand. And Oh, it’s putting some around his mouth and his ears. So I can now go back.
And those structures are part of the model itself, which is kind of cool. All right. So it’s got all of those in the ears and everything. If you want to see what this is going to look like with the non tree, like structure, we can go back to supports clear supports and then do linear. So we’ll do this say, okay, auto supports and it’s going to run through the same process. And this time it will do either straight lines or zig-zags depending on what it chooses here. There we go. Some straight lines to go up and get those supports in place to do the hands and everything else. So kind of cool. I actually like the tree structure. It tends to use less material and usually it comes off pretty well as well. So I’m going to clear those, go back to tree, like say, okay. And I’ll support that. So we’ll put those tree-like structures back in. Now, when we go to print we’ve got PLA we’ve got our supports enabled this time, which means we want to print what’s shown here, which is good. Raft is disabled. We’ve got it on the high quality, 0.1, two millimeter. And I think we’re in good shape. We can go ahead and hit print here. So I’m going to say okay to this and we’ll save this off and send it to the printer. Just like we did before
Now,
Watching little Grogu print here and seeing the final results. I want to tell you just a little bit about this printer right here, which is really cool. I’ve been working with flash forge for a couple of years. Now. They’re a great company that makes high quality printers that really work well. Now I’ve had, I think, 12 3d printers at this point and flash forwards. I’ve had four of them and they are some pretty amazing products. This is their newest printer. This is the creator max too. So I’ll put links in the description. If you want to go check out this printer, what you’re seeing me print right now are the very first prints off of this printer that I’ve ever done. I have not tuned it. I have not tested it. I’ve just done the initial calibration out of the box that you saw me do earlier.
And that’s it. It prints well, it just works. So if you’re looking for a hassle-free experience, give flash forwards to try and specifically check out the creator. Max two, here. It’s an excellent printer. One of the killer features on this printer and there are many is it has independent dual extruders, which is called IDEX for short. Now IDEX means that each of these extruders that you see moving around right here can move independently of the other. You can have it do one print on one side, and then on the other side, do a totally different material. So it can do mirror mode so they can go like this. They can duplicate and new two of the same prints. So if I wanted to do this little baby Yoda, for example, in blue, on the right and white on the left, I can do that. No problem.
Another really cool feature of the dual extruders is that you can print multiple color prints like this one here. So it’s actually printing a wall around it so that it keeps the distinct colors away from one another. So red and white it’ll handle both of those on the same layer with no mixing. And then all you have to do when you’re done is peel it off. And it’s kind of like on hatching, this egg of a 3d print, you can see it keeps those colors really independent of one another, and ends up with a really beautiful finished product.
In addition to the independent dual extruders, it’s got the metal magnetic release plate bed, which is really nice. It’s got the single lever leveling. So I can actually just twist one button, one lever down here, one knob, and it will actually level itself just off of that one. It’s a really smart suspension system that it’s got in there. It’s fully enclosed, as you can see. So it keeps the noise down and it helps you to print things that are really sensitive to drafts like abs filament. And then you’ve got your full color touchscreen down here. You’ve got two spool holders on the back. So you can’t see the spool of filament because there’s two of them mounted onto the back here, which is really nice. So a great printer. If you’re interested in having something that’s really solid and that’s just going to work for you every time.
So again, links are in the description. Please check that out. If you want to learn more about getting started with 3d printing, there’s a few things that I haven’t been recommend. Number one, I’ve got a video called 13 things. I wish I knew before I started 3d printing. So you might want to check that one out if you haven’t already, and I’ll put a link that one right here, and then also there is a support guide or a troubleshooting guide that’s available that I’ll also link to in the description. And that has basically the how to troubleshoot just about everything that you can come across with 3d printing. If things aren’t sticking to the bed properly, if the layers are shifting at a certain point, if the layers are not sticking to each other very well, and it’s kind of sparse or a thin, if you’re getting stringing, you know, any of those sorts of problems that you’re most likely going to encounter with 3d printing can be resolved via that troubleshooting guide.
I have nothing to do with that troubleshooting guide. It’s not a sponsor or anything like that. It’s just something that I think is really helpful that I’ve been able to call on and direct people to, to help figure out problems that they’ve got with 3d printing. Hopefully what you’ve learned in this article has helped you to get started. I know it’s kind of a long article, but there is a lot to go over. And at the same time, I feel like there’s so much that I’ve left out because there’s just a lot that you could potentially cover in a article like this. Now in the comment section below my comment sections tend to be pretty active, which is a good thing. So if you have questions, feel free to leave those questions below. If you have comments or tips, strategies, things you’ve learned along the way, leave those for others and maybe look through those comments and see if you can answer some of the questions that other people have below.
Also, you may want to consider joining a Facebook group or a Reddit group and see about 3d printing online so that you can talk to other people who are into 3d printing and see if they can give answers to your questions there as well. Now, I thought it would be cool to show you the finished product of what I’m creating here. As we printed the bolt already. I’m just going to show you the wing nut that I’m printing right now. It’s a very quick print. We’re seven minutes in, and it’s about a quarter of the way done. So in about a half hour, total, it should be all set and I can show you that. So thanks for watching today. If you have any questions, like I say, leave those in the comments section below, be sure to check out some of my other videos about 3d printing, everything from Octolapse to 13 things. I wish I knew to updates and other printer reviews as well. You can check out the 13 things video right here.
📦 PRODUCTS IN THIS ARTICLE 📦
- Flashforge Creator Max 2 ($969): https://geni.us/HEGphi
- 5 pk of 3D Printing Snips ($14): https://geni.us/10fTo
- PLA Filament ($18-35): https://geni.us/9oWTb
- PETG Filament ($18-35): https://geni.us/79mP5Ez
- ABS Filament ($18-35): https://geni.us/ML7kw
- TPU Flexible Filament ($18-35): https://geni.us/AibL3
Most links are affiliate links, which means you pay the same price as always but I make a small commission, which helps out my channel – so thanks!
📲 LINKS FROM THIS ARTICLE 📲 *
- 3D Printing Troubleshooting Guide: https://www.simplify3d.com/support/print-quality-troubleshooting/
- Download Flashprint (for Flashforge Printers): https://www.flashforge.com/download-center
- Download Cura (for other printers): https://ultimaker.com/software/ultimaker-cura
- Buy Simplify 3D (the ultimate slicer – pricey at $149 but powerful): https://www.simplify3d.com/buy-now/
- Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/
- MyMiniFactory: https://www.myminifactory.com/
🎬 CHECK OUT THESE VIDEOS! 🎬
- 13 Things I Wish I Knew Before 3D Printing: https://youtu.be/LvGKfevdf_Q
- 3D Printed Bulletproof Stormtrooper: https://youtu.be/Gz8tEhuOIqw
- 2 Tricks for Getting the Perfect First Layer: https://youtu.be/tvIGWd-AL98
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