Years ago I was at an injection moulding company discussing a part with very tight tolerances where the owner told me how different their material shrinkage was depending on the color they use and that blue was the worst! Ever since that day I wondered if this is the same with 3D printing filament? Does it’s color affect the performance of our parts? Most of you will know that there are a ton of parameters that influence the strength of your 3D prints.

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Let’s start with something awesome and this was the booth of the StartUp RecyclingFarik, which is German for Recycling Factory and they basically are the only company worldwide to which you can send your 3D printing waste, and they will turn it into new filament. With RecyclingFarik, if you live in Germany they will send you a free shipping label if you collected at least 2 kg of PLA and PETG or 7 kg of material if you live in Europe.

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3D printers have been becoming really fast recently, yet there is still one big physical challenge that holds them back and this is how fast you can get the material in the nozzle to melt. The thermal conductivity of plastics is almost by two orders of magnitude lower than the one in brass for example. This means that even though the 3D printer nozzle can be super hot, it takes a bit of time until the heat traveled into the filament to melt it. This means that at high speeds, when the filament is quickly pushed through the hotend, the core can still be solid, while the outside is already molten. Core Heating Technology tackled that by splitting up the filament into three individual strands that are then thinner and therefore melt faster, making it possible to basically double the maximum extrusion rate. Even though this technology is patented by 3DSolex where Carl uses it for awesome Ultimaker high-flow printcores, it, of course, didn’t take long until we saw knockoffs on the market, and even some printer manufacturers snuck special nozzles for higher flow capability into their machines. I would have even expected to see something like this on Bambulabs machines, but my cold pulls looked very clean and I think they were very cautious not to run into legal problems right at their launch. Talking about the patent, I think that 3DSolex and Bondtech deserve a ton of credit for their work but there are currently some interesting things happening around the patent, which I’ll discuss later.

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Filament-based 3D prints are sometimes limited by physics. The steeper the overhang, the more you run into the risk of the nozzle just printing in mid-air and the material drooping down. Yet quite recently, you might have seen the FullControl.XYZ challenge where due to clever movement of the printhead, you can print complete horizontal overhangs into mid-air, because every previous loop supports the one next to it. Unfortunately, this demo is hand-crafted and just shows what could be possible with 3D printing. And here is where the story of the ArcOverhang starts that once again shows how much advancements in software still is able to bring 3D printing forward! When Steven McCulloch was messing around and printing in mid-air, it worked way better than you would imagine. These spiral discs also were self-supporting and created almost perfect overhangs. He then pushed it to the next level and stacked discs on top of each other, realizing that he was able to print huge overhangs without the need for any supports. And so the idea for ArcOverhangs was born. Instead of stacking discs manually on top of each other, Steven developed an algorithm that takes an overhanging surface and fills it with arcs that start at the location where there is still support to the main print and then grows them outside, getting smaller and smaller until the whole surface is filled. And this doesn’t only look mesmerizing in the animation but works just as well if you print out the samples on a real printer.

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Current 3D printing slicers are dumb. What I mean by this is that even though they are slicers for 3D printing they simply stack 2-dimensional layers on top of each other to form your final part. There are basically no movements within the GCode instructions where all 3 axes move simultaneously. That’s why current 3D printing slicers are rather 2.5D slicers. But why are they using this approach? Well, simply because it’s mathematically easy and honestly because this approach works remarkably well. Yet we are leaving a ton of potential on the table because 3D printers are easily capable of complex 3-dimensional moves, yet we don’t have any software to take advantage of it. Over the last few years 3D printer slicers didn’t really change a lot besides being way easier to use and much quicker. Yet the general slicing approach always stayed the same. Cut a 3D part into a 2-dimensional slice, draw perimeters around the circumference and fill the rest with one of many infill patterns. The only real evolution we’ve seen this year is the Arachne Perimeter generator first seen in CURA that dynamically adjusts the width of the extrusions for more details and fewer gaps. Still, everything is on a two-dimensional plane, which causes the typical stair-stepping pattern on sloped surfaces and of course, requires supports on overhanging structures.

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This is a quick run-down on how to use the transformation scripts developed by the ZHAW in Winterthur, Switzerland to perform conical slicing yourself.

I forked their code on GitHub to make it easier usable and fixed some bugs. For the moment, I’d recommend working with the scripts found here:

https://github.com/CNCKitchen/ConicalSlicer/tree/master/Scripts%20for%20Variable%20Angle

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Have you ever had a piece of equipment that you disassembled more than once and then realized that the screws didn’t bite anymore because all of the plastic got ripped out of the hole and now it’s totally useless? This is where heat-set inserts come into play. They are melted into the plastic so that you can repeatedly assemble and disassemble your creations without losing any functionality and you can find them in a ton of professional equipment. If you designed something that needs to be robust and where you regularly need to work on, heat set inserts are a great way to achieve that goal. I have already done a couple of videos on that subject and compared the performance of different types and techniques. After all of this, we even started selling our own and the first lead-free brass heat-set inserts for 3D prints in our own shop at cnckitchen.store and at different resellers all around the world because we believe they are a way to get functional 3D prints to the next level.

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“Complexity is free” is a sentence that’s often used for marketing 3D printers and 3D printing technologies. Even though up to a certain degree, this is true, depending on the additive manufacturing technology that you’re using, there are still geometrical limitations that a designer needs to take into account. Filament-based 3D printers can print very complex structures, but when it comes to overhangs, there is just a physical limit that can be achieved with conventional machines and current slicers. Unsupported overhangs will simply start drooping down at a certain point, leaving a very bad surface finish, resulting in geometrical deviation and can even cause print failures. You can use support structures, but they require printing time, can be hard to remove and simply cause waste.

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If you’re only the slightest bit interested in 3D printing I’m sure you’ve heard the name VORON printer over the last two years because those machines combine everything an enthusiast 3D printer user want’s to have on their machine! CoreXY kinematics, linear rails on all axis, Klipper with input shaping for super fast, yet accurate printing, a beefy milled aluminum bed for perfect first layers, professional electronics, drag chains, lights, enclosure, air filter and so much more! Yet, you can’t buy a Voron off the shelf. In this video I’ll talk about how owning a Voron today is way easier than it used to be. Is the hype deserved and how relevant a Voron still is in the age of highspeed printers like the Bambulab X1, that you can buy ready-to print, off the shelf for less than a Voron 2.4 costs.

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If you ever bought yourself a roll of clear 3D printing filament, you might have been quite disappointed that the parts you printed didn’t come out transparent and rather just looked more like a transparent whitish color. Though I recently stumbled over an article on printables.com where a user named Rygar1432 shared their settings with which they were able to print really nice looking, almost clear parts. The prints didn’t only look really nice, but I also asked myself what the strength of these parts was because they looked as if the layers perfectly bonded together, potentially eliminating the weak point of FDM 3D prints which is that they often tend to break within the layers. I don’t want to spoil the results - but I wasn’t disappointed!

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