"if you are new to 3d printing. what is a " Topic

Hi There,

if you are new to 3d printing. what is a good printer to use.

I am thinking of getting in to this 3 d printing. What would be a good printer to start with?

What pitfalls should I e aware of?

My suggestions for what they are worth:

Research. Read through various reviews at different sites. One of the best is 3dhubs. Get a feel for the printing process. Can you design in 3d or are you like me and going to search for free/low cost models t print? Play with some of the free design software and slicing programs.

Know that some printers are open source and some are closed. Some require you to buy only their filament and others are agnostic.

Once you start narrowing down your choices, check out the user communities of the various printers. You will quickly get a feel for how supportive they are and if there are any issues with particular models of printers.

Have a good idea of what you are wanting to print. The build volumes of printers vary a good deal. If you start wanting to print things bigger than your printer can handle yo will need to learn to split your models.

There are two broad categories of printers. Ones that lay down a thin plastic layer and build up the model and ones that use light/laser to fuse a liquid resin into a shape.

I'll add more as I think of them.

Depending on what you are going to print, be very careful about resolutions. For wargames figures you really should be around 25-30 micons resolution IMHO.

SLS looks to be the real future. No post processing. No supports, etc. But the machines are still too expensive and slow.

My strong advice is to start by posting notices on the boards at all of your local gaming stores to find someone local who ALREADY OWNS AND USES a 3D printer.

Then buddy up with that person to have a look at what they have and what they are doing. If they are willing, even for a price, to do a printing project for you and let you assist and observe, this will be the very best series of lessons you could get to help you make your own decision.

My feeling is that if one simply does online research and then purchases a 3D printer for oneself, the odds are excellent that you will be disappointed.

I don't know much about the latest printers, but back in '85 I designed and built the prototypes for the world's first commercial 3D printer.

Your local public library may have one available to play with, with lessons if you go at the right time.

The perils are paying $500 USD for a printer to print something someone already makes for a couple bucks. If it's for personal satisfaction and enjoyment…well that can be priceless. Calculate all the soft costs such as raw materials, software and other tools necessary. Buy in costs can be deceiving. Make sure you are happy with the print quality before you get disappointed with the wrong purchase.

Watch tons of online reviews…

If it looks too good to be true, then it probably is.

You will find many similar looking 3D printers at widely varying prices – as stated above, do your research and check on support – some printers are pretty much ready to go out of the box, others expect you to be a tinkerer and fix things the manufacturer could have done but didn't to reduce the final retail cost (or boost their profit margin). Some cheapies are excellent, others are a waste of materials.

Don't expect quick results, all the videos you will see are vastly speeded up – it will take several hours to do each print, so basically one print/object a day – if nothing goes wrong with the print. If you are happy tinkering with odd machinery then you may find yourself buying a couple of basic machines to print bulk copies of things which don't need high resolution such as bases.

thank you all of you for your advice. I am still a couple of month's away before I consider one. But like all of you said. I really need to define what I want to to do with it.

Looking at 6mm and 15mm figures and terrain. Sandbags and emplacement positions.

thanks

My take on this is don't,yet. First draw something up and get it printed at somewhere like shapeways, or on a mates printer. If you enjoyed the experience then decide what it is you want to design and look accordingly. There are lots of printers of a budget nature that will do 0.1mm layer height. I think this is perfectly acceptable, some think to the contrary. If you want to just buy files, most are compatible with cheapish printers to give them access to a large (ish) market.