Hi, all. So my first ever 3D printer is on its way to me. I went with an Elegoo Centauri Carbon, partially for the option of using OpenCentauri firmware. I have been looking at various models on printables.com and Thingiverse, getting excited for the possibilities. I would just like to ask if there are any big pitfalls I should look out for as I’m starting my 3D printing adventure. What mistakes did you make when you were just starting out? What resources do you wish you were aware of earlier? What general advice can you give me?
Thanks in advance, and have a lovely day.
Not to scare you here, but just being real. There’s so many new people in the hobby these days with printer prices getting so low, and so many get easily frustrated so easily and just blame the machine without learning the hobby….
This hobby takes a LOT of patience. Things are going to go wrong, prints are going to fail. You will have to try over and over again with different methods and tweaks. (Not 100% of the time, ofc, but it’ll happen!) While specific printers will have their quirks, most print issues are not printer specific, so any guide to “fixing your prints” will be a good starting point. The most common reply you’ll see to an issue is “user error”- which usually is the case involving any of your settings, filament quality/condition, and/or the condition of your print bed. Keep the bed clean! Dish soap and water is the best thing. A lot of people praise Iso. Alcohol, but that doesn’t always work, and in some cases actually ruins bed surfaces.
Calibrate your filaments and keep them dry. There is no “best settings for X”- they will be a good starting point, some might actually work for you without tweaks, but there is literally thousands of combinations of print material, printers and print environments…so, what works amazing for you might just be a pile of spaghetti for me! Learn the slicer software- they are super powerful now. All the settings can be overwhelming, but you’ll get there in time! Printer mfgs love to brag about print speeds, but fast almost never equals clean. In most cases just slowing down your print speeds can significantly clean things up, or even prevent failure.
If you are pulling .3mf files from any of the sites, be aware that they will have the creator’s full print settings in the file when you load it in the slicer, a lot of which probably wont work for you or might even throw errors in your slicer (bambu labs files are bad about this in non-bambu slicers)- so you’ll need to go through and check everything that changed. Some might be on purpose because of the design (top/bottom layer patterns, fuzzy skin, painted supports, etc)
This hobby is super rewarding and it’s really fun to watch things come to life, but you gotta have the patience to work and grow with a very complex machine!
Not scary at all. Thank you for the thoughtful reply. It’s good to try and be realistic in my expectations. I’m excited to learn new stuff and see myself improve.