This is something I needed to get off my chest.
I know it is a thing to get the most speed out of your printers and cut corners to save printing time and fillament. I am just here to say: DON’T!
To clarify why I say that, here is where I come from.
I was first introduced to 3D printing through my job at a medical device company. In 2013 we bought an Ultimaker 2 and some rolls of fillament. At first I wasn’t that interested in the machine, but soon I recognized it had some great potential!
Unfortunately I found out quickly that 3D printing was (at that time even more than now) a very very slow process!
In order to get some results quickly we tried to tune the profiles and set up the printer to get it to print as fast as it could. I mean, we are engineers right? We know things! We increased speeds, changed slicer settings to minimize fillament usage etc etc. With some varied succes. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it failed.
After some weeks of tweaking and tuning I started to look back to see what we had achieved.
In our pursuit of speed we had spent a number of weeks on trying to increase production while actually producing nothing. In an attempt to save on fillament we wasted spools of fillament. Our fast profiles would often fail halfway because they were unreliable, wasting a lot of time and fillament…
So basically I learned then that it is better to do it right than to do it twice!
Better slow it down a little, use some more support to make sure the print is succesfull than to squeeze all the speed out of it you can and use minimal fillament. In the long run that will get you your products faster and save on wasted fillament a lot! Being a little conservative is often the fastest in the end!
So next time you think you can shave off a cool 25 minutes of an 8 hour print by using a little less support or something… Think back to this post and make the right descision.
Do with this what you like, I just wanted you to have an oppertunity to learn from my mistakes.
