And So It Begins - My Entry into the 3D printing realm

It's been a minute or two since dropping a post. Just picked up my first 3D printer and found a new purpose for posting. Looking to learn, and help pass on what I learn as I go. So, here we go!

Man talk about a firehose of information! There's a lot to take in when you delve into 3D printing and then decide to take the plunge. Printers, filament, software, configs, renderings, STL's... and so on. I guess if you are in the community you know what I mean.

After looking at different printers I decide on a low-cost entry in the Ender 3. Seemed like it had some good features, quality and a good price point to start. Probably should have spent a bit more on a v2, but hey, it's my first.

The Unpacking and build

My youngest son is looking to become an architect(he's still in high school) and we thought this might help hone his design skills, on the software side, along with helping to pick up some tech skills along the way. So he's elbows deep in this too... we've moved on from building Lego :-)

The building of the printer went pretty smooth. A few stops and start as the picto-instructions were not always super clear but we made it. We've set it up in a section of the basement that we are calling the '3b Forge'.

The First Print

We watched a ton of videos on printing and designing. It was a lot of information to take in. My son had used AutoCAD at school so we dug into Fusion 360. After a bit of humming and hawing, we got to work on creating a "3b" coin. After all, this is a crypto space. It all seemed to be coming together.

We picked up on a video by Maker Muse (Fusion 360 for Beginners - Design and 3D Print a Maker Coin! CAD For Newbies), that walked us through a tutorial in Fusion 360 and allowed us to make our "3b" coin. Win-Win.

Our Fist Design - The 3b Forge Coin

The video was great and all but then we ran into a problem... how the heck do we print it? Well, after some more hunting we found out that this version of Fusion has a slicer built right in. We found some more tutorials and finally generated our GCODE for the print. Awesome!

Printing took a couple of starts and stops as well. I could not get a good placement on the plate height. It was either was too high or in one start too close to the extruder... yikes. I had thought that it would be a bit easier getting that but it was really manual tweaks.

If anyone has advice on that let me know. Still feel that it's not the best just yet.

Anyhow, we got it going and the first layer was good and off we went.

It was a pretty small print and took about an hour to lay down. We were really happy with what came out in the end. From the design all the way through to the printing. Pretty good experience.

Had some really minor stringing that I don't think is 100% avoidable. Rubbed them off with my finger.

Have a look and let me know what you think. I printed it with the following (let me know if there is any more info people like to include):
Printer: Ender 3
Filament: Black PLA 1.75mm from AMZ3D
Design: Fusion 360 / Inkscape

Anyhow there we go. I'm in and having a blast so far... I've done a few more prints with the samples included - a Dog, Cat and they are turning out really good as well.

The Next thing

Whoo hoo! Ok, now we are cooking. So, I think I'm going to do a limited run of these as 3D printed 2022 HIVE coins. I'll print up 100 of them, in white, and mail them out at 5 HIVE each, what do you think?

And the adventure begins.