Hi, I'm luke. Today on Out of Darts, we're going to talk about 3D printing. Specifically,
we're going to talk about a lot of the custom supports that we create for our designs. 3D
printing is an amazing manufacturing process. Here at the warehouse, we run 97 3D printers,
printing nerf mods, parts, supplies, and accessories. This is an example of a barrel,
and starting with this part, these are good examples of what an ideal print is. And to me,
an ideal print is a print that just prints on the bed. No support, no brim, no extra features,
and it just lets you print. Now you can't always get away with this because there are
a number of designs that we want to do where we just can't have them print in this method.
Sometimes this is because they require a fastener, or some sort of connector,
or some interlocking part. Or perhaps they've got a hollow cavity, such as this flywheel cage that
has a motor well, where a motor has to go inside. Now you could bridge and allow that part to print.
But often, you'll find that you get a lot of droop there, which causes a lot of part cleanup, and
extra flashing, and material that you don't want to deal with. Here's an example of some regular
supports inside of this component. And this is one part where we have not improved it yet, but
you can see it's a substantial amount of waste and it's a substantial amount of clean up time.
That's where custom supports come in, and we use a variety of custom supports here at out of darts.
My buddy Tarik, who has done a bunch of these designs, is responsible for some of the most
remarkable ones. Most frequently, we're cleaning parts up with an x-acto knife, a set of pliers,
and then a heat gun. This is a battery door for a Stryfe. This was designed by Tarik,
and this has a feature where there is a recessed nub on the back here that needs to slot in. So
essentially, what's happening here is this would print on air. Now general, automated, supports
will look like this. they're very messy, they end up all over the warehouse, and they take a lot
of time to clean up, depending on your settings. But, what we have trended towards is doing custom
supports for as many parts as possible. So, in this case, you can break off one clean part
and you are done. Doing the supports like this generally saves plastic, and it saves a ton of
time in our setting here, where we are producing a considerable amount of 3D-printed parts. Given
that we're running 97 printers, we go through a lot of plastic. And making these supports
cost less, that is weigh less and have fewer parts, and making the part itself faster to
clean up is absolutely key to running a successful printing business. The next part I'm going to show
you are two flywheel cages. These flywheel cages use the exact same motors, but they've got very
different supports. This one here you can see is the automatic-generated supports by Prusa Slicer.
There are a lot of settings you can customize in your slicer to improve them, but the biggest part
here that's the largest hassle are the motor wells. Now the motor wells require cleaning,
and then you've got an interface layer. And you can see already that I am sitting here,
that this is already problematic because if you had to do several hundred of these,
I'm still cleaning the same motor well. Now Tarik came up with very neat custom support here,
and I want you to watch this. The same motor well, it's the same shape underneath here.
One piece. Done. That hole is clean. At worst, we would heat gun that and make sure
that the hole is totally clear, but that part again just breaks off with fingers. Likewise,
the sides which do have to float in air because they are the screw bosses here,
they pop right off. It's just a really easy custom... Again, I've got this motor well,
so it's just really simple to clean up this saves not only a considerable amount of
support material because this is only a single wall, but it really saves a lot of time and a
lot of mess. Any mess that ends up on our floor is ultimately a mess that we have to sweep up,
and we have to clean up, and it just compounds the amount of time that we spend.
This is another one. This is a sling mount, and it connects to the bottom of a Stryfe. It extends the
Stryfe [grip]. This is also designed by Tarik, and I pretty much demanded that at this point,
after he made one really good custom support, that he pretty much has to do it for everything.
So this has a brim to help combat warping, that's one thing, but that's a default setting. But then
it has an overhang that has to basically be a flat wall. And so on this part here, one
single line here, about a little less than a millimeter across, and that is the support piece.
So the rest of this is just cleaned by, you know, tearing off the brim. But the default supports
would have filled this entire gap and cavity inside and would have required a lot more effort
to actually clean up these supports. Both can save you money, especially if you're making hundreds or
even potentially thousands of parts, and then, of course the time savings is really the biggest
component. This is a Perses Hopper in two halves. This is a design that I did that is basically an
add-capacity to an existing blaster called the Perses. Now I wanted these parts to interlock,
and I wanted them to not have to use hardware, both to not have to pay for the hardware and just
to make the design a little more elegant. So I designed two parts that interlock, and essentially
they interlock like this, and they've got a little detent plastic there that holds them together.
Now there are two things we did here. One is I did a manual brim on the inside and what this does is
prevent the base from coming off of the edge. Because we've got a relatively thin wall,
the likelihood over this 15 (and a half hour) print is for this to warp off the bed.
If the parts warp off the bed, they won't interlock, and that would be a problem. So what
I did here is I created a 0.2 millimeter, which is the layer height, single layer extrusion. I don't
have the tool in front of me, but we normally use a reaming tool, and it's just one or two passes
around and you're done as far as prep. That and we just hit it with a heat gun. So this half prints
with just that brim (0.2 millimeters) that we remount, and that's it. The other half, however,
is the 'male' portion, which needs to insert and connect here. So that has got a custom
support because the initial auto-generated supports were an absolute nightmare.
So this one, I have designed one spot here that if you grab it, it pulls the entire support ring off,
and you've got a nice clean part. Again, we've got a brim here that helps with the adhesion
on the bottom. I wouldn't normally pull this out with my fingers, and we just ream it quickly. And
then the two parts can mate together, except I didn't finish cleaning this one up enough,
so we'll do that real quick just with my fingers. Again, we would use the proper tool for this,
but I'm up in the studio and a little too lazy to go back downstairs. So these parts then
mate together, and this made it so that these parts are always clean, they always fit together
really well, and they don't take as much time to clean up. When we had the automated supports
generating around this edge, they caused all sorts of artifacts and inconsistencies, and then
you would just have to spend a lot of time picking out the different parts. And now, with this single
ring coming out very quickly and easily, it makes it very fast to prep the part and get through
production. That's ultimately important because the more time we spend on prepping these parts,
the more that we have to charge for the parts, and the more it's going to cost the customer.
And I think anytime we can add value by either removing supports completely,
which is, of course our goal. Anytime we can have no supports, that's really where we want to be.
But then, making them very simple to clean up really impacts our production here. Now lastly,
I want to show you what I think is probably the coolest custom support I have ever seen.
And this is something that Tarik did. I don't know if he got this from somewhere else, but this is a
Jupiter mag well. Jupiter is a rival blaster; it takes a magazine in the back here, but we print in
this orientation, and it connects to other parts for the front. But this part prints vertically,
and in the back, it's got a Picatinny rail. Now, if you were to generate automatic supports
in here, you will get a huge mess to clean up in there, and it will take a lot of cutting,
and you'll end up marring the surface, and end up with a far inferior finish to where we ended up.
Tarik came up with this perfectly interfaced and designed custom support. And this is just like,
it's so satisfying. I hope you can hear this on camera, but there's essentially a little bar here
which you can grab with your fingers or with a tool. But I usually just take my four fingers,
and it's done. And so what this is is a very tiny interface part that fills those gaps, so these
Picatinny rail edges will be nice and sharp, and they're really crisp. They look really good,
and there's no drooping, and we didn't have to modify them with a different overhang angle to
make them work. so they fit the standard Picatinny spec. So for this tiny amount of plastic here,
we get that perfect result. Since we're printing in a sort of odd orientation for a Picatinny rail,
that's my absolute favorite custom support. And it's really satisfying every time we prep
it because it goes so quickly compared to what we used to have to do, which would damage the part,
it would ultimately create rejects, and over-processing, and that was really a problem.
As I've mentioned, I would always rather have no support, but custom supports are
really a nice way to fine-tune your 3D printing process and make your life a little easier.
I love this challenge, and it's just one more tool in the arsenal of design that we have
to make a better product that we can produce faster, and better,
and get out to all of you. I hope you enjoyed this rather different video looking at the 3D-printed
side of the business. Let me know in the comments if you'd like to see more of this.
One thing I've been struggling with the channel is that a lot of my content
ends up being more redundant because other YouTubers, that do really great work,
usually beat me to the punch. And those are people like Drac, and WalcomS7, and Captain Xavier, and
I don't really want to make the same thing that everybody else does. So, I am
trying different videos, as you've probably noticed and will notice in the coming weeks, and
I want to see what you think of them: Whether you want to see more 3D-printed content or you want
to see more behind the scenes. Obviously, I will always continue doing the 'big design' videos when
we have a big product or a big mod that I've done. And I've got several in the works, but I thought
I would try something different. So let me know in the comments. Do hit that like and subscribe
button if you enjoyed the video. Thanks again for watching. Until next time, I'm out of darts.
you