3D Printing

IMPORTANT
Currently all space printers have issues following the high intensity use as a Covid-19 face shield production facility
Please check the individual printer pages for specifics to see if it affects your part

We have several 3D Printers of various size and capability in the space that you can use listed in Printers. If you would like to use a printer, come by the space when it's open and ask if a printer is available and if someone can show you how. If you want to be assured of printer availability and assistance, send a note to the So Make It Mailing list or our Slack channel (#3D-PUG).

An expert will be able to suggest the best printer to use for your thing and how to complete the process of printing it. Printing with Cura is a good place to start.

Printers

So Make It has 9 3D printers in various states of repair and dificulty level to use. In approximate dificulty order (from least to most) they are

  1. Lulzbot minis - 5 of in total, one is fully out of action and one is set up for flexable filament material.
  2. Lulzbot TAZ 6 - larger build area than the minis, can be setup with an SD card or with a laptop running cura.
  3. Lulzbot TAZ 3 - Currently setup for flexible filament material. Needs to be driven from an SDCard
  4. Cerberus Delta - SDCard and not dimensionally accurate. can only print PLA.
  5. Cube Pro - Currently undergoing conversion. Not available for use.

Pricing

We charge £0.04 per gramme for any printed plastic you take away with you, you don't pay for any failures if you put them straight into the fail jar. You do pay for support material. There is a scale next to the printers that you can use to weight your parts after printing.

Estimating Cost

After you slice your part, and before you print it, you can look for the following line in the gcode file:

; filament used = 2139.9mm (15.1cm3)
  • PLA weighs 1.4g/cm3, so the part above is 21.14g and £0.85.
  • ABS weighs 1.0g/cm3, so the part above is 15.1g and £0.61.

Printing large things

The current policy on long prints is that someone must always be in the space while the printer runs, so sorry, no overnight jobs.

Some Advice

  • If you can arrive with a model in STL format this will be useful, modelling a thing often takes longer than actually printing it so don't expect to be able to do both on the same day.
  • Some things can't really be printed on our FFF Type printers, or need support material to be printed with them and removed later. An expert at the space will be able to advise you about what can print and what won't work so well. Generally the only restriction is "you can't print on top of air"... We can do overhangs a bit past 45 degrees and we can bridge over large gaps if the bridge is flat.
  • A good resource to check if your thing is print friendly is the document
  • More helpful resources here:
  • More guidelines for designing for 3D Printing
  • Simple guide for what 3D package is suited to what task. others to consider: OpenSCAD if you prefer a programming like interface
  • Check this for common causes of first layer problems

Print Queue

If things are busy, then this page will dictate the order jobs will be allowed to run on the printer

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