- Hi, it's Matt.
Something arrived today (slides package)
that I'm kind of excited about.
It's my first 3D printer! Let's open it up!
(fanfare)
I've wanted one of these for a while,
but I haven't had the excuse.
But seeing as I'm spending so much time at home,
(tape crinkles)
I thought, why not give myself something to play with?
(plastic crinkling)
(box scrapes)
(plastic crinkling)
Hee-hee-hee, and the one I bought it,
it's a Prusa Mini.
And the reason I've gone for this is,
because apparently, (box scraping)
it's meant to be really good.
And it's not too expensive.
Let's start by saying I've wanted a 3D printer for a while.
But I decided that I won't get one
until I have something that I want to make,
I've had a go at using some 3D design software,
and 3D printers, get to the stage where they're
at least as reliable as a cheap 1990's ink jet printer.
So I'm not expecting it to be fully reliable,
but I'm expecting to do it, something most of the time.
And the reason I say that is I've got several friends
who've got 3D printers and they've had them for years,
and they seem to spend more time calibrating fixing them
than they do using them to actually print stuff.
From what I've heard and what I've read,
the research I've done, it seems that
the Prusa printers are kind of at that stage
where they mostly work without you having
to fiddle with them.
And they've recently released the Prusa Mini,
which is what I've got here.
So I've got one to give it go,
because I've got a few things I want to print.
Hopefully, I'll be able to show you them
in some future videos.
I've had to go with Fusion 360,
and it seems reasonably easy to use.
I've designed a couple of things in it.
So I ordered this!
Let's have a look inside.
(blade scrapes)
This actually wasn't meant to arrive for a few weeks.
Prusa have been really good.
It wasn't due until the third week in January.
But as you may have heard, Britain's doing a little Brexit.
As I speak now on the last day of 2020,
they haven't finalised the entire trade deal yet.
And I was looking a few weeks ago
to see if I'd have to pay any extra import duty,
or anything like that.
And the page on the UK Government website said,
"We don't know, it hasn't been decided, yet."
And I got an email from Prusa the other day
saying they've stopped taking any new orders
from anyone in the UK.
But every existing order has been upgraded
to air freight rather than ground freight.
And they were trying to get them all to the UK
before the 1st of January, and all the rules change,
just so it gets through,
and it doesn't cause any extra hassle to us or them.
So thank you very much to them for doing this.
I've paid for this, with my own money.
It's not sponsorship or anything like that.
Too much waffle, let's open it up.
(box scrapes)
I've never done an unboxing video before.
Right, we've got assembly manuals.
We've got, oo. (plastic crinkles)
Bits of Filament.
(contents rattling)
Some gummy bears!
(contents rattling)
Okay, there's loads of stuff here.
I'm gonna get it out on the table and start to assemble it.
This isn't where I'm gonna be using it,
because as you may have seen in my videos
this is a rather wobbly table.
So I'm gonna stick it in a small corner of another room,
which should be a bit sturdier and out of the way.
I haven't considered how I'm gonna film in there,
but that's a hurdle I can cross when I come to it.
Right, I've got everything out that I think I could need.
They send you an updated version
of your Prusa Mini 3D printer,
they're calling it the Mini Plus.
Okay. (papers flapping)
I have the instruction manual I need.
For this manual, please prepare
a two and a half mil Allen key,
and a mini bag of Haribo Bears, (chuckles) okay.
Let's put this down.
I'm sure It came with its own Allen key,
but I'm gonna use mine because they're nicer.
Uh.
(tools rattling)
I've got that ready.
(plastic crinkles) Haribo Bears.
Keep the bag with the Haribo Bears closer now and hide it.
Unattended bags tend to mystery disappear.
When I first found out about and saw 3D printers,
it was about,
maybe nearly 10 years ago, now, when I was a member
of the Manchester hack space, HacManchester.
I'd never used one.
But they seemed like a cool thing,
but you had to build it yourself from 3D printed parts.
It was a RepRap.
That was the name of the style of 3D printer.
I'm doing the research on this.
It's based on the RepRap style printers that I saw
maybe a decade ago now.
And the whole point of the RepRap printer,
as I remember, was that it was meant to be built out
of as many 3D printable parts as possible.
Meaning that if anything broke you could replace it
with your 3D printer or another one.
And this too has got loads
of different 3D printed bits on it.
For those of you who aren't familiar with 3D printing,
this printer and others like it work
by heating up and melting some plastic.
And then squirting it through an extruder.
Basically, laying a line of molten plastic on a surface.
Once that's dried, it goes up and lays
another line on top of that.
So you end up with lots of different layers of plastic,
which all then kind of form together,
and stick together to make one piece.
Kind of works like a glue gun, really.
That basically gets something plastic-y, and melts it.
But with much smaller globs,
and it's a bit harder.
Tell you what you're getting a good look
at my concentration face. (laughs)
It's not complicated.
(plastic crinkles)
These steps so far, aren't hard.
They're just, I'm just reading them a few times,
just to make sure I'm doing it right.
Just like doing
a piece of Ikea furniture.
You don't want to put, miss a step,
so then you have to do it again.
Three screws in.
Okay, so that's the two main bits attached together.
The next part is to screw the screen in.
So I've got most of the bits plugged in now.
It didn't take very long.
I've got a Filament sensor here.
Filament is the plastic that goes through,
and then gets melted to make the 3D object.
That was quite hard to push in,
I ended up needing to use some pliers.
Once I've got that on, and figured out all these cables,
make sure they go in the right place.
That was all mostly okay.
I now needs to make a spool holder.
All the plastic that you use comes in rolls, or spools.
So this will be, so then it can roll,
and unravel while it's drawing in.
Amazingly, out of all of this process,
the hardest thing I've had so far
is just trying to get this nut in the hole.
(table squeaks)
Which is kind of good.
(chuckles) So the only difficult thing
I've had is really minor.
I think that's it then for the build.
I've got what looks very much like
a 3D printer here, all assembled.
I've got my spool holder.
All I need to do now is put in its final resting place,
plug the power in.
And then have a go really.
Yeah, I'm gonna go move this into the other room,
and see if I can find a camera angle
where you can see too. (laughs)
Turn it on.
(machine whirs)
Oo.
(machine beeps)
Say hello to YouTube. (laughs)
- [Sally] Hello, YouTube.
(machine whirs)
- [Matt] It's done its self test and it's happy.
(plastic crinkles)
Now I to load in the Filament.
Yes, I do need a taller tripod.
(box scraping and rattling)
Oo, wow, look at the colour of that.
Tiny dribble of plastic there.
(machine beeps)
It's day two!
Last night I managed to set up and calibrate the printer.
It took me quite a while longer than the manual suggested,
which was about 30 or 40 minutes.
It took me several hours, because it was New Year's Eve,
and I was doing it in between video calls
with friends and playing games.
So I didn't have my full attention on it. (laughs)
So it did take a few hours.
But the 30 to 40 minutes with your full attention
does seem reasonably achievable.
The calibration was more fiddly than I expected.
I'll show you what it does.
It prints this zigzag line on the printer bed
and then a filled in rectangle.
There are diagrams in the manual
which show you how flattened the bead of Filament should be.
But in real life, it's so small,
it's actually really hard to see.
So I kept turning down the nozzle height
until the filled in rectangle at the end stayed together
as a rectangle rather than a lot of zig zag lines
that weren't stuck together.
And that seems to have done the trick.
And then next I've printed the Prusa logo
as suggested by the manual.
And that seemed to come out okay.
So I moved onto the 3D benchy,
which is the name of a test piece,
which looks like a little boat.
And it's basically a standard that people seem to use
to test how well their printer is working.
And in all of the review videos I've seen
for cheap 3D printers, the way they test it
is by printing out one of these.
So I did one too.
My thinking being, if mine looks weird
then other 3D printing pros will be able
to have a look at it and see what's wrong with it.
But compared to loads of the review videos I've seen
for cheap 3D printers, mine looks excellent.
There's have lots off, I don't know, squiggly bits
and melt-y bits, whereas mine just looks like a boat.
All of this means I've got a working 3D printer
so I can print whatever I can think of!
I've got a couple of ideas coming up,
So keep an eye out for those.
Thanks for watching.
I'm @MattGrayYes on all the socials.
If you want, you can buy my merch at shop.mattg.co.uk,
and hit subscribe, so you don't miss my next video.
(machine whirs)