Resources
3D Printing
Please refer to our slideshow, INTRO TO 3D PRINTING, as a refresher when 3D printing.
Maintenance on our printers is carried out by staff and student workers, but occasionally you may run into a problem that you need to solve on your own. Everything you need to know about operating and maintaining our Bambu Lab printers can be found on the Bambu Lab Wiki. This includes resource pages for our three types of H2 series printers. Additional information can be found below:
Refilling filament on a Bambu Reusable Spool
AMS Workflow and Troubleshooting
Some advanced information for the H2D and H2C can be found below:
Introduction to Filament Grouping Strategy for Dual Nozzle Printers
Printing Guide for using PLA with PETG support (or vice versa)
H2D TPU Printing Guide (top rack recommended)
Information on slicing files in Bambu Studio for our Bambu Lab printers can be found here:
Bambu Studio: Quick Start Guide
Bambu Studio: Color Painting Tool
Bambu Studio: Support Painting Guide
All3DP has a useful guide with troubleshooting general printer issues and test print files for how to correct them:
How to Fix Everything from Stringy Prints to Bad First Layers
3D Design
Computer Aided Design, or CAD, can be difficult to learn quickly. We recommend beginning with Tinkercad, a free web-based platform accessible from nearly all computers on campus with a low barrier of entry. Autodesk Fusion is our recommendation for designing 3D-printed parts, and we have licenses available for members of the Bates community. OnShape is a good free (ish) alternative to Fusion, and for mesh-based modeling we recommend exploring Blender. Our staff and student employees are familiar with a broad range of applications to help you get started.
How do we make design decisions for parts destined for 3D printing? Does 100% infill give your part ultimate strength, or is it a myth? Design for 3D-Printing from Rahix’ Blog is essential reading on this subject.
Laser Cutting
A few very important notes about laser cutting:
- Always run the attached Performance Filter whenever the laser cutter is in use (automatic
- Never leave the laser cutter unattended while in use
- Do not stare directly into the laser for extended periods of time
- Remove excess materials from the bottom of the laser cutter after each use
- Clean surfaces and laser (when machine is off) after every few hours of use