5 Things I Wish I Knew BEFORE Buying a 3D Printer

[00:00] So you're researching 3D printers or maybe you've been inspired by watching time-lapse videos of little plastic dragons materializing out of thin air and thought to yourself, yeah I need to be able to do that.

[00:12] I love 3D printing. I've put a thousand hours on my Bamboo X1C in the past year alone. That's three hours a day every day. But there's a few things about the hobby that I wish I'd have known before I got started. That's why today I'm bringing

[00:26] you the top five things I wish I knew about 3D printing before I got started. All right, so you got your shiny new printer. Congrats. Welcome to the club. Now what? Well, now you're going to want to print something. And to print something, you're going to need

[00:39] filament. Lots and lots of filament. Let's say you want to make this adorable little articulated fox. Well, to print this one, you're going to need orange for the body, white for the ears and tail, and black for the eyes and nose. But wait, tomorrow you find this

[00:54] cool little elephant blowing a red heart balloon. Well now you're gonna need gray for the body and red for the balloon. Can you see how this starts to get out of hand? All of those gorgeous prints

[01:06] that you see online, part of what makes those pop is the perfect filament choice. Sure you can make substitutions, a gray fox just looks like a wolf I guess, but a green elephant makes me feel like

[01:19] I about to start hallucinating pephaloms and woozles And here the kicker once you buy this orange filament you better hope you really really like orange things because you got a full kilogram of the stuff now But I had this idea to start a 3D printed business

[01:33] Yeah, you and literally everyone else who's ever unboxed a 3D printer since ever. Look, here's the thing, and this might sting a little bit. There's nothing special about your articulated dragon compared to my articulated dragon.

[01:48] The results are going to be identical. same quality same finish same everything and you can't just sell these these are someone else's models you either need to get really good at 3d modeling or if you're going to do it right

[02:02] you license the models which cuts into your profits faster than you can say intellectual property lawsuit don't get me wrong people make a lot of money selling these things but just be aware that you're entering into a market that has a low barrier of entry is completely flooded and

[02:18] filled with people that are perfectly happy to race you to the bottom in terms of quality and pricing. Speaking of filaments that pop, I got this super cool dual extrusion matte purple and green because it looked awesome in the product photos and my brain immediately went, ooh, Joker colors.

[02:34] So I went online, found a Jack Nicholson bust and waited excitedly for eight hours while it slowly materialized. Then I just stared at it because what exactly do you do with an eight inch tall Joker bust It doesn match my decor It not functional in any way I can display it without people thinking I have some sort of Batman obsession which I don I don I just like the colors This is your future A house full of incredibly well objects that

[03:04] serve no purpose other than proving that you can in fact make them. And this will happen with probably 90% of the cool prints that you want to build. Like I said earlier I love 3D printing.

[03:16] But unless you're exclusively printing practical stuff or have very patient friends that don't mind receiving random plastic gifts, you're going to end up curating a museum of things I thought were cool at 2 a.m.

[03:30] Except for this one. This one's a good one. I should have mentioned this back in the filament section, but not every printer can even do a multicolored print like this. It requires what's called an AMS or an automatic material system.

[03:42] And basically it's just a fancy box that automatically switches between filaments during a print. Pretty cool stuff. But here's what nobody shows you. This is what's lovingly referred to as printer poop. And this...

[03:56] is all from printing that one little fox. That's right, I am literally throwing away almost three times more material than went into the actual print. And this is because every time the printer switches colors, it has to purge the first color, load the second color,

[04:12] over and over and over again, which results in exactly what you see here. There are ways to recycle this but that not the point So yeah you can absolutely make prints like this Just know that there a mountain of expensive plastic waste behind each multicolored print that nobody talks about Printing off small gadgets and toys is fine and for

[04:33] most people 256 by 256 is all you'll ever need. But for a select few of us eventually you're gonna want to print off something bigger. Take me for example. I've been growing out my beard because I want to go as Kratos for Halloween this

[04:46] here and I thought because I have a 3D printer I just print off the Leviathan axe as a prop. Turns out legendary axes don't fit on my build plate. Who knew? You're just not gonna be printing off anything large-scale in one piece. They

[04:59] won't be strong enough, it'll take forever and for really big stuff it's literally impossible unless you want to glue together 47 pieces like some sort of plastic jigsaw puzzle. There are bigger printers out there, sure. They also

[05:11] cost more than my first car and you need to dedicate an entire room to them. So unless you're ready to explain to your roommates why the living room is off limits, you're probably stuck to the standard build volume like the rest of us peasants.

[05:24] Well, I'm sure this comment section is going to be full of measured and reasonable responses. Look, I don't want to scare anybody away from 3D printing. It's genuinely awesome and I wouldn't trade my 3D printer for anything.

[05:36] But going in with reasonable expectations is going to save you money, frustration, and a lot of explaining to people why you have so many tiny plastic objects scattered around your house.

[05:48] As always, thanks for watching. I appreciate you and we'll see you on the next one.