Ever since we got a 3D Printer and I learned how to use it, there’s a new thing my parents always ask me whenever I’m back at the homestead: “Hey James, can you print this for me?” A friend in my reenactment group once mentioned to me, “Why are you trying to print things all the time, when you could make them out of wood?” He had a point, especially for some simpler things, but I had just gotten a printer of my own, and I was riding high. But I still stand by my answer: “I don’t have space for a bunch of power tools, but the printer fits on my coffee table, and it can do whatever I want.”
If you don’t have a printer yet, you may not realize all of its possibilities, but once you use it a time or two, you realize what a powerful new tool you have.
Table of Contents
Why would I need a 3D printer?
When we bought our first 3D printer, I was surprised how much use we got out of it. We initially got it for printing model planes. Once we had it, we ended up using it for many other things as well. The biggest draw of a printer is that whenever you think “I wish I had this super-specific thing,” you can make exactly what you want, rather than going out to jury-rig a solution from the junk drawer, closet, or worse, a trip to the store. Where we live, the nearest store is half an hour away (longer if the roads are icy) and often has a limited selection; making constant trips back and forth isn’t really an option. But with a roll of filament and a few standard-sized fasteners on hand, you can make basically whatever you want. Just this last break, Mom showed me how she had been storing the inflations for her milking machine indoors: on the plastic shelving unit in the utility room, she had daisy-chained two plastic coat hangers, and she was threading the tubes through the bottom hanger. It technically worked, but it was haphazard, bulky and precarious. I repurposed a design I had already done for hanging my shaving brush, added space for a couple of bolts, and made a set of hangers that clamped onto the shelving unit’s upright post. No more coat hangers!
Even if the project is something that you could hypothetically do by hand, the printer can do it while you’re busy with other things, and it can do it with perfect replicability.
Our projects have included a lot of different things:
- Cheese press followers that imprint designs into the cheese wheels
- Nameplates
- 600 event tokens
- Specialized crafting tools
- RC model parts
- Home furnishings
- Phone cases
- Leather stamps
- Toys and models
- Halloween costumes
- Precision parts
- And lots more!
Designing new parts can be as simple or complicated as you want it to be. If you just want to do things the easy way, Tinkercad is a free in-browser tool that is surprisingly versatile; most of my designs have been done with it. It works by putting basic shapes into your workspace, and either adding them to what you already have, or subtracting them. Would I try to design an entire working car that way? No. But for most things I need to toss together for the printer, it does its job easily, and it lets me type in exact measurements for what I need. So even though I have other options open to me, Tinkercad is still my bread and butter.
If you want to dive deep into modeling, Blender is completely free, and Fusion 360 is free to hobbyists. Blender is good at modeling organic shapes, but its user interface can be opaque. Fusion 360 is professional CAD software, which is great at making machines, and its learning curve is offset by a great stock of included tutorials.
If you don’t want to design things yourself, sites such as Thingiverse have massive libraries of things that other people have designed, that you can download for free and print off. Or if you have younger relatives (in their early teens, for instance), you can get them started with printing and designing in exchange for running print projects for you when you need it.
What do I need to look for in a 3D printer?
The important thing to keep in mind is that for your first printer, especially if you’re just giving it a try, you don’t want to break the bank. The reviews on the Lulzbot TAZ 6 may be stellar, but it’s a printer for enthusiasts, and it’s priced as such. If you’re just starting out, you can get a capable printer for far less. Just keep in mind that an entry-level printer will have fewer extra features, so you might have to deal with some tradeoffs. Here is what to look at and consider, so you can determine if a given printer will meet your needs.
Printing process
Most printers that are feasible for home hobbyists use the FDM process: Fused Deposition Modeling. The printer starts with a roll of thermoplastic (aka your filament), pushes it through a set of gears (the extruder), and into a heated nozzle (the hot end). The hot end is moved over the print bed to deposit fine layers that build up to produce the desired parts. FDM is easy to use and very flexible in what it can do. Other methods exist, but are often unsuited to larger objects or are just plain expensive. If a printer is trying to sell you jugs of resin, UV curing devices, or it’s suspiciously tiny for a suspiciously large amount of money, it’s probably SLA, the second most common consumer printing process. It uses lights or lasers to cure photosensitive resin out of a pool. This produces small parts in truly insane detail, but it’s expensive, unsuited to large objects, and it’s more than most people will ever need.
Build volume
Your printer has a finite area to work with, and this limits the size of your prints. Many cheaper printers keep their build volumes small for the sake of cost or form factor. Depending on your purposes, this can be a good or a bad thing. Maybe you need to print big things, or maybe you want a printer that can share desk space with other things. Many objects can be printed in multiple pieces to fit in smaller build areas, but some things can’t. The cheese follower, for instance, had to be printed at the size of the cheese press. There wasn’t a good way around that. Other things work better broken up into smaller pieces, regardless of the area you have to work with. Many printers have a build area that is a more or less eight inch cube, and that will work for the vast majority of prints. Smaller is entirely feasible, as is bigger, but don’t be swayed by a large printer you may not need, especially if size comes at the cost of other features.
Flexibility of materials
There is a wide variety of filaments out there, and not every printer can handle each one. Each type of filament has its own benefits and drawbacks, and it helps to know in advance if you’ll need to be able to use multiple types of filament.
*Also a common thing you will find when looking at PETG: Yes, it is technically foodsafe. However, it will have come through a 3D printer that has probably run things through it that are not PETG, so the printer it came from is not food safe, and dyes used to produce certain colors might not be food safe. The resultant part will have a rough surface, so some models might be hard to clean. A print in uncolored PETG will likely be safe enough for temporary exposure to food (such as cookie cutters or cheese press followers) after a good washing, but it would be unwise to use it for long term contact, such as containers.
Flexible filaments: Filaments such as Flexible PLA, TPU, and Ninjaflex can range from “a bit more bendy than PETG” to “basically silicone.” These are great for hinges and parts that need to stretch, but not every printer can handle them. The filament itself will stretch and flex even more than the parts made from it, so your extruder motor may end up trying to push a string. Extra filament may spill out the side of the print head, rather than being successfully pushed through the hot end and onto the print. If you are uncertain whether a printer can handle flexible filament, see if you can tell where the extruder motor is, and how far away it is from the hot end. If all else fails, just ask. Some previous user has almost certainly given it a shot and can give you an answer.
Hybrid filaments: These are the filaments with particulates in them, such as carbon fiber, wood, bamboo, metallic powder, and glow in the dark. Exact printing requirements for these can vary, and they can have a broad range of characteristics for strength and cosmetic finish. They all have something in common, though: They are abrasive, and can degrade a normal brass 0.4mm nozzle. If you would like to get into these filaments, ask the userbase or tech support about upgrading your nozzle to a hardened one. If you want to print in wood, that often has large particle sizes and can jam the 0.4mm nozzle, so you will want to swap for a 0.5mm. Nozzle switching can be varyingly difficult on different printer models. I would recommend waiting to get into these until after you’ve become comfortable with PLA.
If particular materials are unimportant to you, then all the easier, but if there is something you really want to do, you should make sure your chosen model has that capability.
Heated beds
The most important thing for print success is how well the first layer of the print adheres to the bed. If the early layers peel off the print bed while the print is running, your part could have major imperfections, or come off the bed entirely and devolve into a meaningless tangle of plastic. Many print beds involve laying down a bit of glue stick or painter’s tape to improve bed adhesion on all materials, while others use a build surface such as kapton film that works for everything, but can potentially be damaged by grabby filaments like PETG. When printing anything besides PLA, you want a heated bed, or else the early layers will cool prematurely, which can cause warping or outright release from the build plate. PLA still benefits from a heated bed, but it can get by without.
Bed leveling
The other component to bed adhesion is how well the bed is leveled and calibrated. Having a low corner can result in the nozzle trying to deposit filament on empty air, or a high area can collide the nozzle with the bed, potentially damaging the bed. Methods for bed leveling and calibration vary, and tend to be more involved on the cheaper printers. If you are not confident in your ability or willingness to handle more hands-on leveling methods, it may be worth springing for a printer that can do more on its own.
Enclosures
Printing inside an enclosure is the next step up from having a heated bed. While this is again less important for PLA, ABS requires it, and PETG can benefit. Heat from the extruder and the print bed will warm the enclosure and reduce warping tendencies, as well as helping to deal with low ambient temperatures. The other side benefit is that if your printer is in reach of children or animals, an enclosure will help prevent them from touching anything that shouldn’t be touched. The possible downside is that an enclosure will probably increase the printer’s footprint. Worst case, if you decide you need an enclosure after the fact, your printer will be a great help in making one yourself.
Control method
There are two ways of controlling a 3D printer: via direct connection to a computer, or by removable media. USB is the cheap way of doing it, and tends to involve leaving a computer plugged into the printer, with the control software running, at all times. This saves on electronic complexity for the printer, but at the expense of tying up your computer. Some printers can do this over wifi, which is more convenient, but in some cases may still need to be able to check in with the computer. Removable media, like SD cards, is much more efficient. The printer needs to know how to manage itself, but you can load up whatever files you want on the SD card, then plug that into the printer, and leave the printer up to its own devices until it finishes.
Also of note is the control software, generally called the “slicer” because its function is to slice your model into layers the printer can make. Most printers are usable with commonly available slicers, such as Cura (free) and Simplify3D (paid), but some of them only work with their own slicing software. This is not a deal breaker by itself, but if the proprietary software works badly, you may not have other options.
Noise
Your printer will have at least three motors running at all times, plus a cooling fan or two, and this can be somewhat noisy. I can usually tell when my printer starts doing something new by listening to the sound of the motors. It is important to remember that while 3D printing is an extremely flexible manufacturing process, it gets this flexibility at the expense of speed. So whatever noise the printer makes, you will likely be listening to it for several hours at a time. If you have a spare room to do your printing in, you may not care. If you live in a one-room apartment or a dorm, as I do, you may care very much. Noise tends to be inversely related to price, as noise reduction involves subtlety in how the printer is run.
Dual extruders and multimaterial
FDM printing is generally a single-color process. You load in your color of plastic, you hit go, and you have an object that is that color. Some printers can change this by using multiple extruders and multiple rolls of filament, so they can use different ones at different times. There are practical uses for this as well as cosmetic. Most importantly, you can load a filament such as PVA, which is soluble in water, alongside your regular material, and use the PVA for support or infill. When your print is finished, you submerge it in water, and everything that does not belong on the final print washes away. Multiple extruders will inevitably add complexity and thus cost to the printer, and can potentially make it less user-friendly. All solutions involve at least a little bit of wasted build area, whether that’s from multiple nozzles that can’t both use the entire space, or waste towers to clear out a single nozzle that runs all of the colors. Ultimately, it’s best to decide if you want to have a serious investment in 3D printing before springing for a dual extruder machine. If you really need multiple colors, make your print, sand it and paint well. Or you can print multiple pieces in different colors and superglue them together.
There are other features that can have effects on final print quality, but those tend to fall into the “bells and whistles” category, and the above things are what the following reviews will focus on.
Our top printer choices
We ourselves have two printers. Mom and Dad have a Prusa i3 mk3, while I have their older mk2.5. They are both very capable machines, with good sized build volumes, and the mk3 has the benefit of being extremely quiet; faint rattles from the filament coming off the spool are almost as loud as the rest of the printer combined. While these machines worked just fine for us as starter printers and have done most everything we have asked them to, they are not cheap. The mk3 is roughly a thousand dollars pre-assembled, and the Mk2S is only a hundred dollars less, and both of them have wait times of at least a month. So for our purposes, we will stick to beginner-friendly, low price point machines that can be acquired from Amazon. At time of publishing, all five of these are well under $500.
FlashForge Finder
User reviews consistently indicate a good printing experience, even after a large number of prints. Though the bed is not heated, which limits the printer to PLA, it has another useful feature that makes up for it. The print bed can slide out of the printer and be replaced. This makes removing your finished prints easy, and also simplifies cleaning the bed itself. Since this will require the use of a glue stick to keep models in place during printing, built-up glue can eventually cause print complications, and the bed will need to be cleaned periodically. When you can carry your print bed over to a sink or garbage can and take care of it there, it becomes much easier to do. You will want to make a filament holder early on to hold larger filament spools, but that and the lack of bed heating appear to be the only real drawbacks. If you aren’t looking for super-ambitious prints, this printer is an easygoing, foolproof choice at a low price point. Click here to see the current price.
QIDI Tech X-Smart Intelligent Printer
ADIMLab Gantry
Monoprice Maker Select V2
Da Vinci 1.0
So which printer would I recommend most for a beginner? The Qidi X-Smart. The only real complaint I could possibly have with it, is that it’s smaller than what I have at home. For below $500, it has many of the most important features from a printer twice its price. So it’s affordable enough to be a good starter printer, but it’s fully-featured enough to give you plenty of room to grow before considering new equipment.
Will I need anything else?
When you buy your 3D printer, you will likely also want to pick up some extra filament at the same time. Many printers come with a random roll of demo PLA, but those are normally small and low quality. I recommend eSun 1.75mm PLA, which is my general filament of choice. I have never had jamming problems with it, it has an excellent color selection including transparents, it hits a very affordable price point, and it also comes in a stronger “PRO” variant for just a few dollars more. If you don’t see what you want in eSun, 3D Solutech also makes a good product that I have used many times; I generally use their gold metallic for event tokens for my medieval events. On thinner prints, it can be slightly translucent and end up looking a bit like butterscotch.
If you get a printer with a non-removable bed, you will likely want a print remover tool. These are essentially sturdy metal spatulas with rounded edges, so you can pry the print loose without doing damage to your print bed. This remover tool set is an excellent value.
If you think you might want to try 3D printing, give these printers and tools a look! If you’re an experienced printer already, what recommendations or advice do you have for a prospective newbie?
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