Do you want to 3d print faster on your Ender three style printer i'll show you some tricks in cura
to take a five and a half hour printed arm and do it in three right here on Filament Friday.
Filament Friday is brought to you every week by the generous donations of these patreon
supporters. there are printers out there which will print faster than an ender 3 or ender 3 clone
like the voron 2 that's a real popular one right now or a delta printer like the see me cnc
artemis that i have. it prints a lot faster. but those will cost you a lot more money
so the question is, are there things you can do to your prints to make them actually print faster?
yeah there is for example this side spool holder that i showed in a previous video.
just the arm, not even the pivot, just the arm itself if i print it at a point two layer height
it would take almost nine hours to print. if i do it at a point two eight layer height then i save a
lot of time. get it down to about five and a half. but i had a viewer take this, change the design to
a much simpler design, and get it down to about three hours. but i like this design with the
zigzag. it looks more like you know eiffel tower type of build. well i was able to do that in cura
and still maintain that roughly three hour print. and i did it using tricks i've showed
you in previous videos on cura. so let's take this bring it into cura and i'll show you how
we get from this to this. here it is brought into cura i'm using the ender3 max machine profile to
give me more space. let's slice it at 0.2 layer height. it's got 3 walls, 15 percent infill, and
supports just where it's touching the build plate. slice it, 8 hours and 43 minutes. almost 9 hours
to print just this arm. in detail shows us it's mostly inner and outer walls taking the time.
i'll use my 0.28 profile that should speed things up with the same settings. so we'll slice it and
we get 5 hours and 57 minutes almost 6 hours. inner and outer walls are the main time users.
it's all the inner and outer walls and these crosses are treated as outer walls. they're
nice and smooth inside. you want the outside to be smooth because that's what you see.
so it prints slower. but your infill and things like that can print faster because you'll never
see it all. these crosses are outer walls so they come out really nice but that takes time. so i had
a viewer take this design and simplify it. and they actually got rid of all these crosses and
just made it nice and smooth. let's take a look at that. on thingiverse builder red cross took the
design and made it smoother. he made the top and bottom smoother and got rid of all those crosses.
and in the process it prints faster. he claims five hours instead of nine hours
at point 0.2 layer height. and he's right it prints faster. let's take a look at it.
here's his design brought into cura. you can see it's smooth on top and bottom no
more criss-crosses. i'm going to slice it at a 0.28 layer height so it should be faster.
after slicing three hours and 10 minutes. so i just took it down two more hours.
and you see the biggest category is skin the outer skin no longer inner and outer walls. but
i like this zigzag. i like that look that's what i want. so am i stuck with a long print? well no
there's tricks in cura that you can get that same effect. let me show you how to do that.
i showed this in a previous video where you can actually make the top and bottom layers zero so
that way exposes the infill. so i set it to 0 here and let's slice it again and see how it looks.
i reduced it down to 2 hours and 16 minutes. but let's take a look at it in preview
all the infill is now exposed. i'm getting a crisscross pattern, kind of. it's not the
pattern that i want, but i can see all the way through the arm. so let's change the pattern.
i'm going to go into the infill settings and i'm going to change it to 10 percent infill like my
profile normally has. and i'm going to change grid to triangles. now let's slice it again and see
how it looks. as you can see it's starting to look more like the original. but these infill walls are
really thin. so you can actually make them thicker which i've showed in a previous video. so let's
do that. i'll scroll down to the infill setting infill line multiplier. i'm going to change it
from one to two so it's going to be twice as wide. then we'll slice it again let's see the result.
now those inner walls are thicker and stronger but i've got these other areas that are exposed
that i don't want to expose like around the spool holder and then the base of the foot and also the
hinge. i want that to be a little stronger as well. so that's another trick. let me show you
that. i click on the model and then i come to the left menu and click on support blocker. that
allows me to put a block on the design and then i can reshape just this block. so i click off the
model and then just the block and i resize it. i'm going to use 50 millimeters square x y and
z so i'll just set that to 50 and they all change. so i get a 50 millimeter block in all directions
now i need to move this i'm going to turn it on an angle so it's in line with the arm. and i'm
actually going to position this so it's over the area where the spool holder will go and i'm going
to lower it down so it covers that whole area. and then we'll do unique settings within this block.
i come over to the left menu again and go to the per model settings and i select modify settings
for overlap. i'll get rid of what's here and we're going to select a new setting. so i click
on select settings and i want to search for top. top and bottom, but top and bottom are together.
top and bottom thickness. now i want to make this one millimeter so i want a top and bottom here
so i can change this to one millimeter and then we're good. and it's going to slice and put a
top and bottom there. i place similar blocks at the base and also at the hinge so now i can go in
and do the per model settings for each of these. basically do the same thing where they intersect.
make it one millimeter top and bottom thickness. do the same thing for the hinge, one millimeter.
and now i can slice it and let's see how it looks. time went back up again three hours and 21 minutes
but now let's look at it in preview. all the spots where the blocks were are now solid and the inner
part is the crisscross just like i liked. and double walled so it's strong. so let's print this
and see how it turns out. the one in white is the new design. you can see they don't match exactly
but the white one took three hours the red one took five and a half hours. is it worth
the difference? here's one i printed in black but there was a little bit of red filament still in
the nozzle and it really came out cool. you can see the solid portions much easier in this print.
and this thing is strong. it's not flexing hardly at all. and if i need it stronger i could do three
walls. of course i would add a little bit more time but really this is all i need. and now three
hours to print one of these instead of five and a half. i can almost print two of these versus one
so that's how you can print faster without having to buy a new machine. just do some tricks in cura
and maybe a few design changes. so what do you guys think. let me know in the comments below. if
you like what i'm doing here maybe check out some of the other videos popping up. and if nothing
else click on that CHEP logo and subscribe. i'll see you next time right here at Filament Friday