we talked about 3d printing every now and again in fact we've had some great conversations which i've posted at cat5 dot tv 3d printing and on that page we are starting our series on 3d printing as you can see we've gone and gotten one yeah it's a very nice one hmm i've settled on the ender 3v2 for a couple of reasons first of all i'm brand new to 3d printing jeff it's interesting that this is the one you've purchased i have it sitting in my amazon wishlist for christmas oh yes yes and i just said to jen today i'm like i really want to get a 3d printer for me and the boys and this happens to be the one that's on my list well there you go so you get to see it kind of firsthand yeah and and some of the reasons why i chose this printer jeff is the fact that it's kind of the it's it's out of the box ready to print yes as far as like it's it's easy to use it does a good print job and it's really really affordable yeah so there was a few i saw that's like oh it needs four hours assembly time i'm like that's ridiculous hey assembly time i didn't take four hours but yeah it does come partially assembled but there's a fair bit of setup that has to go into it yeah we're going to look at that today i'm going to show you how it went for me to assemble it again though being completely new to 3d printing here it is it's like q4 2020 and robbie the tech guy has never done 3d printing before but you're more of like a programming tech guy sure yeah but to be fair jeff like i've had my eye on 3d printing for a long time yes um kind of covered it on the show for you sure yeah we have uh we've we've been talking about it since the poyo 3d like this is going way way back when consumer printers were like two or three thousand dollars and they were just coming to market and then we've like we've had people on the show to talk about 3d printing and how it's going to change the world yeah there was that book here we are you know 2020 finally getting into it to my credit though i now here in our our hometown of barrie ontario hometown our city um our libraries have maker spaces yes they do so early this year i was actually email corresponding with their makerspace people okay and talking about okay well i want to get into 3d printing how do i get started and we were setting up for me to come in to their uh makerspace to start 3d printing for the very well and that's what happened so they had to shut down their maker space as i was already kind of learning so they they taught me that okay well you need to have these stl models and so that's how i learned about things like thingiverse and sites like sites like that where people share their designs um but because they closed down i couldn't actually print anything yeah but i didn't stop there i kept trying to learn how to do 3d printing to see because i wanted to see is is it something that's going to be practical so i started doing designs on my computer before i even had a printer even selected a printer so um i think that was a really good way for me to do it because it gave me a chance to learn some of the ins and outs of how to do it these hooks yes that was the reason you wanted to get into this right yeah we're going to talk about that well not the reason i wanted to get into 3d printing but right and we'll talk about it after i show you how how i've assembled this um but the hooks that i'm going to show you are a big part of you know one of the ideas that i had so simple too there's a dalek there there's a dialogue yeah of all the things to print of course it's like you've got to you know i've only printed three things and the dalek is one of them and priorities and a little kitten yes so i'm learning um and you're going to be able to learn along with me so i'm taking the approach i'm not trying to be that you know there are a lot of gurus 3d printing gurus who have been doing this for years and they know what they're doing and they're on youtube and there are some great channels filament friday has been a wonderful channel for me to learn on i'm actually running a film and friday firmware on the under 3 v2 right now um there's a lot of there are a lot of gurus out there and i'm not one of them right so my approach is a little bit different with the show in the and with this series in that you're going to get the chance to learn along with me why am i doing the things that i'm doing what have i learned how have i messed up yeah and what am i learning as i go so it's a good opportunity for you to kind of see how 3d printing works and learn the things that i learn as i learn them i think it's going to be a lot of fun i know it's going to be a lot of fun we're already absolutely having a blast at home with the 3d printer i'm looking forward to it so let's say we get a look at oh and i said you know some of the reasons that i chose this printer over some of the other options the ender 3 from creality of course is a very famous consumer printer because it's cheap as far as affordability goes it works with tons of different types of filament for our series we're going to be using pla it's a very good entry level filament it's known to be easy to print and it does a reasonably good print job but it's it's pretty universally like i can just swap that out with a different spool and start printing and it's really really easy but creality introduced the v2 this year and of the ender three and it kind of comes with a lot of the upgrades that people were having to create for themselves okay so you get a lot of the stuff out of the box that otherwise um wouldn't have been an option with an an older gen of of the ender 3. so there's there's a lot of reasons to choose this printer i'm not saying this is the best printer by any stretch right but as far as the economics of it go it's really affordable and it does a great print job and as far as out of the box experience goes you can see i've already been printing stuff and i'm just getting started yeah so very clean prints like that's one of the things with some of the printers is you know you you read reviews you look at the the close-up photos and it's like wow it's not really a smooth looking print it's kind of clunky these are really clean thanks jeff i'm a noob well done yeah all right so let's take a look at how i went about assembling the ender 3 let's do that together [Music] the ender 3v2 comes partially assembled the base is assembled but we are going to need the instruction manual because we need to make sure that everything goes together correctly there is some assembly required you should be able to do this reasonably easily especially if you follow along what's in the manual what you're going to see here today let's start looking at the components we've got the extruder kit here this is what the filament is going to it's the hot end of the printer so this what the filament is going to come out of it's going to melt it and move around on all the axes then we've got the uh the screen here which is an upgraded screen from the previous iterations of the ender 3. it is color but it's not touch just like previous versions it uses the dial wheel here we have the xe axis kit which has the xe motors x being left and right e of course being the extruder which is basically pushing the filament into the hot end we'll set that aside and here's the material rack and the spool holder this is where you're actually going to put your spools of filament and we've got some aluminum extrusions uh for parts of the frame that we're gonna put together so this portion of the ender 3v2 is already assembled this has got the heated printing platform uh quite often you hear this called the bed and it's all part of the machine base it's all put together already for us and it looks like one of my leveling knobs has come off in shipping we'll fix that in a moment but the machine base and power supply are already assembled that has the y-axis tensioner and the motor for the y-axis power cables there uh what else have we got here we've got more extrusions for the frame these look like the z-axis which is your up and down part of the frame and just watch that z-axis rod that's packaged inside you don't want that to fall out so you can see that's a threaded rod it's got some grease on it so watch that's why it's got that sleeve but we're going to set everything aside here and get started so here's the z-axis motor uh it has the rod coupling for that rod uh so we'll assemble that in a moment on to the final stuff we've got some sample filament the belts extrusion nozzles things like that and the belt tensioner for the z-axis a couple screws then we've got the z-axis passive block that's the wheels that are going to go up and down on the right-hand side and it came with a scraper which is great for removing prints from the bed or slashing the eyes of your enemies and we've got a couple of tools here and screws and such for the assembly itself and there's also some side cutters included in there as well a little bonus so first things first i'm going to replace that bed leveling knob that came off during shipping ah there it is so should just go right on there our first 3d printer repair right there just tighten these up so they don't come off and just note as i'm moving things around here that glass bed is held onto the heating platform by a couple of clips just make sure those clips are snug before you start moving it around like i am here because you don't want that to fall off it shouldn't but just keep in mind there's the extruder with the hot end of our 3d printer and back to the book jeff will be so proud of me to see me reading the manual i'm just going to kind of lay everything out here we've got the z-axis switch came with an sd card and card reader like a usb reader just lay everything out so that it's easy access as i'm going through the manual and figuring out how to set everything up and there's the side cutters that they've included for you that's great for trimming pieces of your 3d prints especially if you have any platforming you're going to need those now it is a bit of a process to work your way through the instruction manual and assemble your ender 3v2 as i'm about to do so just follow along in your manual and i'm going to speed things up through the magic of television there we have it the ender 3v2 is fully assembled and ready to print when we come back after this quick break we're going to talk about my first impressions as we print our very first 3d prints on the creality ender 3v2 stick around welcome back you'll notice at the end of the fast motion video there this particular cabling here was on the outside of the top uh extrusion so i had to just simply remove two screws and put it inside but you'll save a bit of time maybe if you make a note of the position of this it wasn't quite clear in the manual and there were a couple of things like that that just weren't quite clear but easy enough to figure out as long as you're patient and take your time but i think now that i've assembled it jeff i could probably throw one of these together in half the time oh that's easily how long did it take you to assemble this well i mean i was shooting video and everything so it's not really a fair um equation right because you know i had eight cameras around me and i'm setting everything up and setting up my shots and things but i'm good for camera i got it uh about an hour and a half it took me all together so i think uh you could probably put this together in about a half hour realistically pretty decent yeah yeah so the the first things that i've noted as a brand new 3d printer guy maker i've never 3d printed anything in my life the the first thing i did was i leveled the bed and that's really really important to use these dial wheels use a piece of paper and i'm going to be demonstrating how to do that there are videos on youtube but we will make that part of the series as well leveling the bed is the first thing that you need to do once it's level and things look good then you can start your 3d print so it came with an sd card as you noted there and um the sd card has some g-code models on it so okay my son liam wanted to print the cat it was just on on the screen we just saw there's a cat so let's try that man you guys have we do now yes so um so he printed this and as you mentioned jeff like it it came out really really great so this was our very very first print yeah so this was just the g code that was included on the sd card and it came out absolutely beautiful and he's thrilled with that so that was our very very first print on day one okay so then day two came and nothing was working the bed wasn't so because i'm starting to i'm starting to play around with my own designs um you mentioned these hooks we're gonna look at those but so the hooks were gonna be my second print okay i designed my own mask hooks yes and these are these are meant to go on a half inch pipe so the cold water pipe in our laundry room because we have an unfinished laundry room this clips onto the half inch pipe and it gives us a place to dry our reusable washable masks our face masks so it's just a neat little thing that i came up with but my wife was was thinking like hey this is really really high i can't quite reach it so the next iteration was a little bit longer and a little bit longer and i went through a couple of iterations so this was the the first one was just this little tiny guy yep right and then the next one was a little bit longer and then finally the final print came out like this so i simply i simply extended the uh the length of it and i designed this in a program called tinkercad which is a free it's a free website tinkercad.com all the links of the tools that i'm using throughout the course of the series are at cat5 dot tv slash 3d printing uh but that's what i use to design this so i basically just i laid it out in tinkercad and and that's what i came up with so and it printed great once i figured it out but day two came and nothing was working and i say that because i was struggling to get the bed to level because nothing was sticking to the bed and it's really really important what i found is it's very important that the first couple of layers are stuck to the bed because if they're not as the printer is moving up it's gonna it's gonna lose adhesion and it's gonna move the the print is going to move and then it's not going to be printing the right thing in the right spot and it's not going to work out was the bed heating up the bed was heating up to 60 degrees celsius everything was working there so i did everything from i gave it a quick wipe down with some isopropyl alcohol um i upgraded the firmware to one from filament friday because it came with an like the original firmware had some bugs in it that he'd mentioned and so i installed his firmware and it still wasn't working for me yeah and then i started thinking because you know i'm i'm the troubleshooter right yes so i've tried everything every time i leveled it still wasn't adhering to the bed so then i started saying okay well what's different between yesterday and today and the one thing that i came up with is our first day print was from the g-code provided by creality yeah creality my second print second day print was a g-code that i created now understand so i've learned a couple of things so i mentioned that i made this in tinkercad i designed it in tinkercad but that gives you an stl file yes or an obj or whatever so these are the file extensions so that stl file can't go to the printer you need what's called a g-code which is a file that tells it how to build the layers okay so that's i'm using a program called cura which is also free links again at cat5 dot tv slash 3d and with that software um it creates the slice layers yes and it spews out a file called a g-code file and so the g-code for this was on the sd card came with it the g code for this is something that i made in kira okay so then i started thinking okay well what's different so i got researching i got looking into it and then finally after several hours of tinkering jeff i found out that g-code is actually a text file a script oh so i opened it in my text editor yep and looked at it and i started seeing that this is just a script it's like code yeah so then i looked at the code for this one and i looked at the code for mine and i compared the difference at the start of the file and found that my g-code from cura was telling the extruder to raise two millimeters at the start of the print and there was a comment that said oh so that it doesn't scratch the print and it was raising a full two millimeters so i started looking so i started another print and i looked down at the extruder and sure enough at the beginning at the beginning of the print i saw the extruder go up two millimeters so it wasn't quite down on the bed so it wasn't able to adhere to the bed so i went in i copied the header from this g-code and pasted it over top the header of my g-code and i printed out a good 10 15 of these hooks and it worked perfectly why the different header because you didn't program that different start code no it was just the default profile so it would it had this raise up two millimeters or whatever so so having replaced it with this header the start code from this one everything printed just fine so i was like oh so that was a revelation for me to realize that the g code is an editable script that you can go in and you can modify and then i'm thinking about all the wonderful things that you can do with that knowledge yeah and it's wonderful so then i took that g code the the start part of the g code and i pasted it into my profile in cura to always use that as my start code that's replacing the one that came with it made a couple of little mini modifications based on the knowledge that i had accumulated from the research that i had done yep and uh now i've got a start code that is working like that just beautiful so every prank comes out people would have run into that issue and would have said the machine's just not working nobody was saying check the start code on your g-code everybody was saying okay make sure your bed is level yeah i did that 10 times make sure that the bed is clean yeah i did that make sure you know that there's no interesting yeah so all this stuff make sure the bed temperature is good uh the g code from cura was defaulting to 50 degrees celsius i noticed that this one was 60 degrees celsius so i increased it yeah and that was done through the material in cura again i'm going to show you how to do all these things so don't worry okay but that's what i learned so then we started printing other things and my other son zach said i really want a dalek yes and so we got onto thingiverse and downloaded the stl file for a dalek now that is not monochromatic that's got two colors you're right so what we actually did is we first printed these parts okay okay so these little guys the extensions and these actually clip into the daleks so we printed it in two parts very cool yeah you'll see that these are all white yes they are all printed jeff with that sample spool of filament i was able to sample i was able to get this out of the sam sample that they wow so i didn't even have to tap into my purchased filament so that is what we came up with for for zach as well so i was really really impressed with that and he's very very happy with that model uh when i was removing the um the supports for the uh the black parts because they're so tiny yes i kind of clipped a little bit too far in places but we can reprint those little parts i was able to say you can reprint and we start talking about how because there are attachments we could create other attachments and yes play around with all that kind of stuff so speaking of wanting to um basically adapt our designs to our own needs so creating attachments and things like that the next thing that we wanted to do is well he wanted to print in black of course so i got a little spool 250 grams of black filament and it's fine but it was affordable because it's only 250 grams i didn't need a big one kilogram thing but it doesn't fit on the spool holder because the hole is too small oh no so i was like well what do i do what do i do jeff any suggestions you print a new school holder so i actually i went on and and i started designing based on some designs that i found on thingiverse but i created this little guy so this is printed with the transparent uh filament this is a new spool holder specifically designed to hold these little spools well so i built i made this spool holder specifically to replace that and it just screws on yep and allows me to to print using the 250 gram spools so then i'm like i can actually adapt my 3d printer create accessories and attachments yeah that i i don't have to get on amazon and buy new parts or try to track down a smaller school you print it yourself so how cool is that that's awesome so overall my experience so far has been great i'm learning as i go and that's part of the fun uh my kids have been so patient as i've been learning and that's that's been a good experience for them i think as well but the ender 3v2 has been i mean so far so good it's a fantastic little printer it's quiet it's got the quiet circuit the the board itself is like i don't know it's upgraded on the uh v2 and apparently is quieter than the older versions we're going to be looking at the actual sound that it generates but you hear the fans there is the cooling system to keep things cool yep um but uh it's reasonably quiet like we could have it running right here and it wouldn't uh it wouldn't probably even be picked up on our microphones yeah so that's kind of you know that's a bit of a primer as to you know here i am i'm brand new to 3d printing and i'm 3d i'm doing my own designs i'm using free software uh in my browser in i'm using cura which is an actual installed application that you can download and install i did find tinkercad has one limitation being a free online service is that the stl files have to be below megabytes okay so are you limited on size yes now that's not a problem when they're only like 200 kilobytes and things like that but as soon as i got into some more sophisticated designs i was like oh wow this is this is 26 megabytes and i can't edit it in tinkercad so that will eventually lead me to start looking at other things but i think tinkercad is a really good starting point okay so cat5 dot tv slash 3d printing is where you want to go to follow along with this series learn from my mistakes and from my victories and i'm also sharing absolutely everything that i do through github you'll see links there so i've got the designs here on my uh what is it called my mini is it my mini maker or something like that i started using thingiverse but it's really buggy yeah so um you'll see the links there anyways dot tv 3d printing i'm still learning all the terms i'm still learning how everything works that's exciting i'm brand new to it but i am sharing everything that i've learned and even that start code for for cura is available on my github repository so excellent that'll get you started as well so all the tips this uh you know as i mentioned earlier this is the one that's actually sitting on my amazon list yeah so uh if you could do me a favor and just let my wife know how amazing this is yeah i'll just kind of let her know i'm just going to start sending her all the videos yes hey check this out i hear jeff might be interested in 3d printing yeah it's totally amazing yeah and if you follow along with the series jeff you're going to have a real good head start on me because all those things that i've had to learn the hard way you're going to be able to do and even so much as these designs are available for you through my github now maybe this doesn't fit into your full review but i've got to ask why clear filament as opposed to the typical red white blue you got to buy filament anyway so i needed i needed filament to print the small spool yes because i didn't have a small spool to print with the cheap filament right the 250 gram filament the reason that i got translucent filament is because i'm going to be making signage for category 5. oh yeah okay the first handful of layers so about a half an inch are going to be translucent light so that light is talking about they're going to have leds inside okay and then the top layer is going to be black so i thought hey i've got to buy filament anyways i'm going to buy a roll of the translucent filament because i'm going to be using it anyways and it looks really cool yeah it does look really nice yeah that's great don't forget we are on twitter at category5tv and i really appreciate it if you would consider becoming part of our patreon fleet head on over to patreon.com category5 it's a great way to support the content that we create here at category 5 tv but at the same time you're going to gain access to some behind the scenes and a lot of great content that is only available to our patrons thanks for watching everyone have a wonderful week you