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Oh youtubers and fellow Iams well this is the first in a series of videos on 3d printing and ham radio I've been wanting to do this for a while wanting to get back into 3d printing for a while Wow a few years ago several years ago I built a 3d printer and had to sell it a couple of years ago but now I'm gonna get back into it and we're gonna talk about what you can do with 3d printing and ham radio at least down the road these first few videos though I wanted to address 3d printing in general I asked some questions on the Facebook page and from what I've gathered and what I've heard from people through the years too is there are three main things that are keeping a lot of people that are interested in 3d printing from getting into 3d printing one being the printer to being design parts design there's a heck of a learning curve there or at least there used to be things have gotten better and the third being slicing which is the preparing of the data to be sent to a 3d printer and there's a lot of factors and things in there all of these together makes too much information for one video so we're gonna do it in three videos and this first one here is about the printer now a lot of people have been put off on 3d printing because of two factors one the printers are very expensive and two they are very complicated finicky high maintenance machines so let's look first at the second factor yeah when when 3d printing first took off in the makerspace the the technology behind it additive manufacturing has been around for decades it's not a new technology but somewhere around eight nine years ago I think a guy named Prusa decided to try to make a robot that could make copies of itself and his creation got popular with the makers and they called 3d printer because it used melting plastic into a bead and lining that beat up and layering it down to draw a part layer by layer and create a real-world object and that's where the 3d printing craze started and for those early first few years it kind of exploded in the makerspace and all 3d printers were hobbyist machines they were all scratch built and eventually built from kits where a lot of the parts were 3d printed but well for example the printer that I originally got several years ago was a Prusa I - and it came as a big box full of threaded rods and nuts and bolts and circuit boards and stepper motors and all the parts and pieces and then you had to completely assemble it and it took me a week and I worked on it a lot I worked on it into the evenings laid into the evenings every day after work but it took a week to build it and then it took a month of fiddling with it and calibrating and changing settings before I got decent prints out of it I mean it was and I'm a technical techie kind of guy you know but it was it was a lot of work to get there and that's how it was for just about anybody getting into 3d printing now long around that time companies started popping up like MakerBot that provided preassembled tested and aligned and calibrated printers like an appliance out-of-the-box ready to go but they were quite expensive over $1,000 easy in in most cases sometimes approaching $2,000 and it's kind of remained that way for a while but lately there have been some low-cost 3d printers showing up that come complete and ready to go out of the box there's lots of low-cost kits you can get a kit now for 130 140 hundred and fifty dollars in that range if you want to go through the the work of building it and for some people that's enjoyable but you're going to have work you're gonna be you're gonna have to put it all together you're gonna have to calibrate it you're gonna have to mess with it you're gonna have to update and change parts on it to get it to where it works well so what I wanted to do is look at something that is a affordable and B comes out of the box ready to go and what I went with was the monoprice select mini version - at a price of just over $200 it fits the first criteria it's affordable and it comes out of the box ready to go so let's go open it up and I'll show you what's in the box and we'll get it set up we're gonna open up the box it's not too heavy yeah it feels about about five or six pounds maybe I was very surprised at how quickly it got here I ordered it yesterday and here it is the end of the day I'm missing my head top of my head there you squat down alright inside the box we have another rocks okay double boxed that's good does it say which way is up no plain brown box yeah there's open stuff on both sides so caught my mic clay I'm really worried about dumping something out of here it looks like the styrofoam got a little dinged but it did its job okay there we go thank you for your order it's just the manual or is it just a ok users manual very thin really nice it's 18 pages looks like quick setup and a little quick users guide remove the printer from the packaging do not remove or damage the printing surface or build platform download the manual install Kirra or repetier software i'll included on the memory card i bet it's the only only the Windows version have fun with your new 3d printer well I do plan on doing that so let's see that would be the bottom right I got a big circular spot in the foam there where I guess they probably would have included a sample roll of filament but yeah you get a tiny little bitty amount of white PL a small box wouldn't you probably be the power supply II yes it is it's a power brick 12 volts at 7 amps small coaxial connector yeah there's the printer it's in there sideways yeah we got another box and this has a USB to micro-usb cable a two-wire power cord it's not three wire grounded hmm when I get to modding this printer I might do an upgrade and switch this over to a three wire well I guess that's that's the power brick nevermind this would be the spool holder arm sits on the side of the printer to hold the plastic SD card and an allen key and a small flexible plastic scraper for getting the prints off the bed and here we have the printer itself it's a cute little thing and there it is as you can see it's not even as wide as I am it's not very big 120 millimeter by a hundred and 100 by 100 by 120 millimeter which is 10 by 10 by 12 centimeters build plate there's the extruder up there and we've got a little bit of packing or a little bit of tape here that just is holding holding things in place so they don't move around during shipping and that's it it's all assembled it's ready to go all you really need to do is plug it in the only adjustment that you have to make is bed leveling well they call it leveling it's not really leveling you know it's it's adjusting the bed so that the plane of the nozzle and the plane of the bed are parallel if you took the nozzle to all four corners of its its motion range and drew a flat plane you want that plane to be perfectly parallel with the build surface and when this is all the way down you want it to be I think two tenths or four tenths of a millimeter off the surface people use paper to do that and I'll show you that and we'll walk through it will walk through leveling the bed that's the only adjustment that you should have to make to the hardware to be up in printing so it's like an appliance it's out of the box ready to go you don't have to build anything you don't have to fiddle with too much just the bed leveling and you're and you're good to go all right so I mentioned that the one adjustment we're going to have to do is leveling the bed which is adjusting the nozzle distance relative to the bed at all four corners so that the nozzle is the same about the 0.22 point four millimeters off the bed all the way across the build platform now to do that the first thing we're going to have to do is we're gonna have to tell the printer to move all of its axes to the home position and we do that using the knob here you can move through the menus there's preheat there's print and there's move now select move and as you can see there is home now when I select home the printer is going to move all of its access axes to the home position including the Z which is the up and down bringing the nozzle down to where it considers home to be which should be point two two point four millimeters off the bed about the thickness of a sheet of paper actually works pretty well which i think is point two so that's what we'll use to level it so let me reposition the camera and we'll do a leveling all right I have it on home I'm going to hit the button and you'll see the build plate and the head I'll go to the home positions okay you heard that little click that was the end stop on the Z it's a little micro switch so it hit that switch and it thinks that it is now at home and what I have is just a regular piece of paper just tore off a little corner of a piece of paper and I'm going to take that and I'm going to slide it under there and okay it's it's catching see that I don't know if you can see that happening but it's catching on the nozzle so the bed is too far up at this corner so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna and they tell you I think at monoprice to do this you turn off the printer so the motors can move and I'll be able to move the bed so if I take the bed back there I feel the paper catching on it so I'm gonna pull it out so I can get to that little allen screw little key that came with it and I am gonna back that screw out just a teeny tiny bit cuz the paper is just barely catching so I'll just move that just a just a hair and we'll put the bed back and take our paper still catching I think I went the wrong way actually I wanted to tighten it a hair's breadth cuz I want to take the bed down alright it still catching but it slides under so it's still just a tiny bit too too high so let me drop that down just just a fraction of a turn I'm turning at about 10 degrees I mean just a little bit the bed back I'm holding the paper really really loose I mean so loose that the the gravity will pull it down like that and I can see where the heads still just catching it and see that just catching it and it's turning in my fingers so we'll pull that back out and we'll turn it just another couple of degrees just the tiniest that just barely catch and I think I'm almost there so I'll have to do this for each of the four corners here we go now I can move it through there and it only just yeah well it's still just catching it just a bit I'm gonna go just a tiny bit more you want to get to the point where the paper just starts to pass through there freely there we go all right and then I'm going to bring the bed all the way out to the other corner and I'm gonna check that corner now there's no catch at all so I need to go up a little bit it's really important to get this right now I'm catching I think yep let's know it's catching so I need to go back down just a little this is the only adjustment you've got to do and you'll probably have to to revisit this every now and then that feels right we're still catching okay we'll go down just a little bit more as the Springs age as the printer ages this can change a little bit some newer printers have auto bed leveling where they make the adjustment every time you run the printer that's really nice the printer that I wanted to look at for this review was the new monoprice mini Delta which does do auto bed leveling but it's not going to be out until June so we might get a chance to see one of those at the RepRap festival I'm hoping almost there yeah it's still catching it will go just a tiny bit more if you don't have this right if there's too much of a gap then that first layer won't stick to the bed and your print will just go sliding all over the place there we go okay all right now I need to move the head all the way out to the other corner and do the other two and after I've done all four I'll come back and check and tweak the four corners so that's bed leveling and once that done once that's done we're ready to load up some filament and print alright now that I've leveled the bed I'm ready to load some filament for my first print now the filament spool I've got sitting on the side of the machine on the included spool holder let me just this on the camera so I can see what I'm doing this is the extruder and it's a Bowden style extruder which means this while there's a little stepper motor here with a toothed deer and this little lever that's spring-loaded has a bearing and the filaments going to go in here but pinched between the bearing and the tooth to gear and then it's going to go through this to this PTFE tube which is a very slippery type of plastic that goes all the way down to the head the nozzle now before we can load filament we have to preheat the nozzle so that it will melt when we load it in there oh I also want to you up the z-axis a bit on the printer I want to lift it up so I can see some filament coming out once I push it through alright so we've preheated the nozzle for PLA plastic which is probably what we're using you're gonna want to set it to about a hundred and ninety hundred ninety-five that's a good temperature so when we push the filament through you'll see it coming out of the nozzle when you reach the other end because it'll melt and they'll go through so I'm gonna find the end of this filament here there it is and I have cut it so it's aw it's all nice and straight it came off the spool with a little bend in it but I cut it so it's nice and straight and we're simply going to compress this to open that bearing up and then we're going to put the filament in the hole and guide it right on through and it goes right into the tube now I'll keep that compressed and I'll just push it through until I feel some resist when I hit the nozzle and there it is now as my nozzle at temperature 190 so if I push this I should see well there we go yep there it is okay I see some filament coming out of the nozzle okay now I've got a filament loaded and I am ready to print my first print so that's really all there is to setting it up out of the box the bed leveling takes the longest once you're done with that you're ready to go [Music] now something a several of you might have caught right off hand is the build volume on this printer is pretty small 12 centimeters cubed big enough to do a lot of little parts for example this this ballin box that I printed out that I'm gonna put my 9 2 1 in for the vertical antenna project it fits on it just fine but with this printer you're not gonna print a case for your BT B ITX or your a QC X transceiver at least not in one piece it's too small for that you'd have to go with a larger printer I thought about going in that route but this was what was within my budget and for a lot of you something like this might be just fine for getting into 3d printing and playing around and experimenting learning about it if you don't want to invest much money for those of you that want to get a printer and you want to start building cases for your transceivers and in the much bigger pieces you're going to have to look at something a little more expensive and a little bit bigger and there are several monoprice has a maker select which is I you know I'm not sure the price look it up I think it's somewhere between three and four hundred dollars you know so you get up you get up a little ways in cost if you want to get into something bigger but as far as just printing out useful parts and things I'm gonna find lots of uses for this related to ham radio one thing that I'm thinking about Don now today I had the idea for there's a regen receiver kit that I was gonna build and part of that it was a Boy Scout kit and part of it was winding a coil on a pill bottle I don't have a pill bottle and I thought well I'll just print out a coil former and I thought you know with 3d printing I could make the coil for more custom I could give it threads to guide the wire and give it a little hole to solder in the tap and mount hole in the bottom the mountain on the board you know I could make it exactly fit the kit you know so there's lots of things we can do with this and I do plan on doing quite a few in future videos however this is the end of this one we're just looking at the printer in this video it's busy right now printing a Raspberry Pi zero case I have a Raspberry Pi zero that I want to experiment with with this with a building a print server for it but we'll get into that in a video down the road but anyway this this is the first in a series this was the this is the printer I'm going with and the printer we're gonna use for the future videos the next video in the series will be on design it used to be with 3d printers that it took a knowledge of CAD and some pretty complicated software and quite a learning curve to start designing parts and that has changed quite a bit there's far more easy alternatives out there now for designing parts for 3d printing and we're gonna be looking at one in the next video that just about anybody can sit down and start making parts with without any knowledge of CAD so stay tuned for that one thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video don't forget to give it a thumbs up also if you're not already a subscriber click to subscribe join us on the facebook channel for discussion about the videos and if you'd like to help support this channel please click to support me on my patreon page