Basic Needs for 3D printing - Before you Get Started!

Hey folks, welcome. I am Technifers and today we're gonna be going over the bare minimum supplies you are going to need to start 3D printing. So it's gonna be pretty simple. We're just gonna talk about some of the things you might wanna have on hand before you actually fire up your printer. Most of them come with the printer and I will show you where to find them and how to get ahold of them right now. So basically, all of these machines come with a couple of tools. So one of the things you're gonna get is usually going to be a little scraper, just like this. This is gonna come in very handy for removing things from the bed and you'll probably end up with a million of them laying around in the long run, but they do usually ship at least one with the printer, as well as a pair of clippers. Those usually come with it as well and a small sample of filament. Now, other than the printer, the filament is one of the only things you really need. I mean, I suppose you could fire up the printer without a scraper or clippers, but they come in handy. That's usually why they ship them in the box. The rest of this stuff are parts for the printer itself, so just kinda ignore that. But the other major thing you're going to need before you start printing is a slicer. Now, this is Kira. This is one of the most popular slicers and what Kira does is it takes your 3D object, such as I have here, and it allows you to bring that object that is basically a 3D model into the slicer itself. It's pretty much drag and drop. And then you have different settings for tuning in how you want this printed, how thick you want the layers, how fast you want it to go, and several other things. And we'll be going over a lot of these settings in one of the videos coming up in this series for the new to 3D printing series I have going for 2025. We normally do this every year. We're a little behind and a lot has changed in 3D printing, so there's gonna be quite a few videos in that playlist. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, leave a like, and check out the rest of that playlist as it comes out. So I'm gonna hit this slice button. I don't really care about the settings right now. I just kinda wanna show you exactly what this software does. Now, that was pretty quick. It's telling me I have an hour and 36 minutes of print time. It's going to use 10 grams of filament and 3.48 meters of filament, which at the prices I put in up here is about 11 cents, which that's kinda good to know. Power cost is zero. So these are our extensions that I put in. We'll go over extensions. We'll go over how to set these numbers up and everything else in a future video. For right now, let's take a look at what our print actually looks like. So if I click the preview tab, I come over here and I can zoom in. And now you can actually see the layer lines in there. And what's even more interesting than that is it tells me how many layers, 374, and I can scroll down through the layers. And if I scroll down to the middle of the model, you'll see this pattern in the middle. That's something very often brought up in 3D printing. It's called the infill. There's several different patterns. There's not really one that's stronger than the rest, but some of them use more filament and slow your print down. So there's a lot of options there. That's one of the things we'll go over when we get into the custom settings. But yeah, so the other interesting thing you can do is not only can I scroll up and down through the layers, let's get real close here. I can actually scroll backwards through this layer and see the actual path that it's going to print. Now, if I just hit this little play button here, it'll show me the entire path. This little white dot over here is what's known as the seam. And we'll talk about that soon in another video as well. And then you have two things that are dependent on other settings in here, which are the shell. So the green lines are inner shell layers. The red line you see on the outside, that is your very, very top surface. So now, if I wanted to print this object out, the other thing I didn't show you that should be included in your printer is a little memory stick here. So this one happens to be a large memory stick, SanDisk style. Most of them come with a USB and some of them come with a USB with a micro-SanDisk in it. So you're gonna need that. Generally, if you plug that right into your computer, there will be some things on it. One of them will be a test print that you can just print without needing to slice. And that's usually dialed in for your printer. So I recommend printing that first. However, if you wanna get right into slicing your own models, there is probably also a slicer on that USB stick that comes with your own. You can actually, it's white, but there is a USB stick in there. So there should be software and a couple of test models, if not at least one test model. I recommend printing the test model, but I don't recommend doing that until after you've seen one of the bed leveling videos I have coming up, because you wanna make sure that everything is set up. Even if your printer comes together right out of the box, you still wanna kinda check that everything's running across the gantry smoothly, and a couple other little details before you actually fire it up. But if I wanted to print this, I would put my USB stick in, I would go down here and hit save to disk. It's as simple as that. Now, I don't have a stick in here, but here I can change the name, and I'm gonna save it as type G-code. G-code is the type of file that printers read, and that will be best and easiest for me to just stick the USB stick right into the printer, go through the files, and select the printer. So at this time, I would recommend taking that USB stick that you have, plugging it into your printer, and looking for any sort of test model. It will be a G-code file, and you should be able to just hit print as long as you're loaded up. If you have any issues, make sure you stick around for the bed leveling and adhesion video that's coming up soon. That's gonna be it for this video, guys. Hope you stick around for the series. If you have any questions, leave them down below in this video. I'll make sure to cover them, especially for those that are new to 3D printers. Now, a lot of these info that I'm giving is true for pretty much every machine. I will tell you if something's machine-specific, but I have used several machines. Most of them are Cartesian. I have a couple Deltas and some Core XY too, but the most common machine you'll find, like the Ender-3 style printer, is a Cartesian printer. So we're gonna kind of stick to that as the basis of what we're gonna be doing in this series. Thanks for stopping by. Don't forget to leave a like, guys. We'll see you in the next one.