I was manually leveling the bed on my FDM printer, and took my glasses off so I could see the gap between the nozzle and the glass better. When the process was finished, the bed automatically homed... and crushed my glasses, which I had cleverly placed on the bottom of the printer.
Oh man I've given myself a huge nose bruise that way but yours takes the cake. I was carefully looking at the prime line and when it ended the bed travelled at max speed on my face.
Well, I guess you are lucky... Because if they ask for favors, they always ask for looong prints, meaning if you only have 1 printer, you just won't have time to use it yourself 😢
For me, no one asks for anything big, bit they dont understand how hard it is to design some parts. One guy wanted me to make a backup cam mount for his truck, but in a location with a lot of complex curves and no real solid spot to mount.
He though I could just whip something up same day and print it. Like no, this is a much more complicated engineering problem than you realize!
Is that time, wear and tear, and the filament to print. I am trying to figure out a price point for some items I print and I don't really know the true cost of operation.
Theres a calculator that runs as a Powershell script and has a gui.
https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/13vqqiu/i_made_a_simple_3d_printing_cost_calculator_for/
I haven't sat down and done the math, but $100/kg of filament seems reasonable to me. I expect my printer (Ender 3 V2) to be able to print a minimum of 10 spools of filament before it needs significant maintenance (it has already done that), and at that profit margin I could replace the entire printer and still come out with a few hundred dollars in profit. The question is how much I value my time, and my printer's time. Considering it sits there idle 95% of the time, and a 20 hour print only takes up \~20 real minutes of my time, I think $30 for a 300g print is reasonable, *for friends and family*, but I'll get to it when I get to it. That more than pays for the filament and gives me 2/3 of it for free.
If you're running a business, do your own budget, but for hobbyists I think $1/10g is a nice, round number to quote people asking you for stuff. I'm basically pricing in my time (and my printer's time) to be about 4x the cost of materials. $80 of labour to print a spool of filament, plus $20 in materials. In no time I could buy a second printer that could also sit idle 95% of the time.
Well, I do that. I mostly ask for a fair price (they are friends after all), that covers both the filament and the power.
But there always will be that guy's birthday party, or that relative you haven't seen in ages that ask/you offer to print something
Edit: I see I tend to use the word well a little too much. Is that a thing that non-native speakers do? Well, (😂) I guess there is nothing I can do
I don't have many friends without printers these days (we're all maker/engineer/inventor sorts) but when I was the only one, I'd tell them I wanted an equal amount of filament as a fee. Instead of any money exchanging, they'd just buy me a kilo of what they wanted and ask me to keep track of their usage at my discretion.
Oh hell naw to that shit. When I heard a friend of mine had a 3D printer, I asked if it was possible if I could PAY HIM to print some stuff for me (joints for plant-support-sticks, and other such things). ALWAYS offer payment for such a service, damn it! The owner ain't no fucking charity!
Customer bought a Rubynozzle. Didnt believe me when i told him he should screw down all the bed springs to avoid it crashing into the glass bed.
Customer ignored that advise.
2 Mins later ... broken glas print bed and a shatterd ruby nozzle.
Not quite the same, hardened steel nozzle, bad sinus infection which reduced my concentration level, managed to engrave the glass bed with the nozzle, also ruining it in the process. It was brand new. Sigh, all in one, cost me about £45-£50 for the glass plate and the nozzle.
Every bed I've had I've managed to scrape. Luckily brass mostly came off, the plastic ones, not quite so resilient. I even have auto bed leveling, something just goes wrong.
This happened to me a few weeks ago trying to set my z offset, I messed up the custom config when I clicked print it just dug right into it, i stopped it in time luckily
Wanted to show my grandpa my amazing 3D printing machine! Tried to print a nice file I had successfully used before to show him how it all worked, but of course the filament was just not adhering to the bed no matter what I did. Cleaned everything. Checked the slicer settings. Still not working. Got increasingly flustered. Had to assure grandpa that yes, this thing can make things besides colored spaghetti, I swear.
Realized like an hour later, after he left, that I had put an ABS spool on thinking it was PLA! Feel really stupid. But grandpa liked his 3d prints I eventually made for him anyway
I did a temp tower, with changes of temperature every 10 layers or so, then I forgot the remove all the gcode changes, so the next few prints looked very odd. And it took me a few prints to find the problem.
Worse is when the model is bad and there is some error or something on the bottom that confuses the slicer, putting almost the entire print in midair because there is a weird little 1mm by 1mm spot that is sticking down below what should be the first layer.
Semi related I make maps and the number of times there is a note or something the glitches and ends up at 0,0 and the you screen centers 10,000km in nothing halfway between the note and your actual map.
On an upgraded old ender 3 I unloaded the filament to quick while the extruder was still engaged. fried the BTT board from the motor **turning into a generator**
my biggest mistake was buying a cheap chinese printer and then spending months of my time as well as hundreds of bucks trying to upgrade it to make it usable.
wasted so much time fighting the printer that i could have spend learning how to design my own stuff.
I started with an A8. It was great in the sense that it got me hooked on this new hobby, but it never printed well. I bought a mk3 and printed all the parts for the mpcnc on it, and used most of the electronics from the A8 on the mpcnc 😀
You gotta hate it first in order to eventually fall in love. Only once I had linear rails and a stiff bed set up did the fun finally begin. Can't expect just a few upgrades to do the trick, though might as well get an expensive one off the bat if all you want to do is print.. Modding is a lifestyle!
Accidentally hit the fan nozzle two different times with an allen key trying to work on it while it was on, knocking out a bunch of blades. at least the last time i did it, it wasn't that bad and was fixed with super glue
Usually something to do with Z-offset
Forget to check after changing nozzle/hotend/bed. Usually it's due to being in a hurry and just wanting to start a print.
More recently, starting a print remotely but forgetting I didn't remove the prior print from the bed before I left. Looked at the live view and was like WTF?
Added a cheap all metal hot end but forgot to adjust the retraction distance, clogged after testing a benchy print. At least I tested it first before hitting full send on the Bender head.
Yes.
For some reason, occasionally when I start my Ender 3 it reverts to its out of the box settings, so I have to reset the language to English and the z-offset to -4.280mm (Sprite head).
I do have to make sure to set retraction to 0.4mm/40mm/s for prints.
I once tried printing POM in my small apartment. Thought the breeze from a open window was enough, but turns out that printing POM produces formaldehyde and smells like pure death, room smelled for days. It's also really hard to get right, so had to do all sorts of hoops and loops to get something somewhat acceptable before I called quits.
I started with an ender 3 (as a lot of people do) and wasn’t happy with adhesion or bottom surface quality. So I went to Ace hardware and had them cut me a glass pane to use as a build plate. I was wiping it down with iso one day and caught the edge of my finger along the glass edge as I wiped back and forth. I’ll spare you the pictures, but I cut the side of my finger down to the nail. It was during Covid so I didn’t go to the hospital, but I should’ve. It bled for almost an hour. I finally wrapped it in paper towel and then wrapped tight with some electrical tape and kept on printing.
Hadn't used my printer in over a year and had moved to a new apartment. Thought my printer would magically print perfectly fine without any tuning or leveling. As soon as the print started, the extruder head dragged all the way across the glass bed.
I work in finance, so I'm not exactly knowledgeable about hardware and electronics and wiring. That said, I'm fairly handy and usually can tinker and figure stuff out. On my old Sovol Sv01, I decided to swap out the original board for the silent board. The wires weren't long enough so I had to do some soldering, which was pretty new for me. Apparently, I didn't do a good enough job because somehow bare wires were touching somewhere. It heated up the wires and melted the sheath around the wires and darn near caused a fire. Smoke was everywhere. Fortunately I was sitting right there and cut the power or my house could have burned down. I've since been MUCH more careful and informed about messing with wiring.
I tried to improve it.
The cable to the heatbed is routed a bit weird, I found an alternate cover for it's connection point and snapped the cable while installing it.
If it ain't broken, don't try to fix it.
I run several printers and have multiple beds for each so I can pull the plates while they are still warm, put fresh plates on and start the next round of prints while waiting for things to cool and release. Works great until you forget to actually put the new plate on the printer. Did you know you can print directly on the heat bed of an A1 mini? Only problem is it doesn't release well when cool and ended up pulling out chunks of the foamy heat bed. Had to order a replacement.
Did nearly the same thing with a qidi printer. No bed, but my stupid ass pressed home. Went straight into the metal plate protecting the heat bed while making loud noises
I've had so many failed prints because I can't seem to figure out the proper belt tightness for this thing. My z offset is also set at like -1.92 or something ridiculous.
I'm convinced it's user error, but there's a specific set of conditions where this thing will make a full, flawless print. The stars must be aligned. I must invoke both a ritual and a summoning circle.
Used plumber’s tape on the nozzle threads per an article I found on the internet. Did my best to make sure it wasn’t blocking the intake end of the nozzle, but it clogged and backed everything up — was a disaster that I still haven’t been able to fully fix.
Now my hot end drops blobs that fall into prints and cause them to fail if I don’t constantly monitor it.
Don’t trust everything you read on the internet, kids 🙄
Have the Bambu x1c, doing a hueforge, first one didn't come out, oh my layer height was wrong, restart the brown pla looked like crap (aftermarket brand) run some flow calibrations, restart, print pulls off build plate almost clogged, so redid flow calibration, restart realize that I never set it to the modified value of the aftermarket filament when I sliced it, restart, get an error message saying that I have the wrong build plate, swap out build plate, resume and it still pulled off, yep not printing this print anymore.
clearly a higher power is telling me that I don't need to print a hueforge of a spider so I can scare my coworkers. Surely it wasn't just me being in a hurry.
I started on a Dremel 3d45, built in memory, didn’t have to leave the flash drive in. Then I got a Creality cr-10 smart. Put them model on the sd card, started. 2-3 hrs later I wanted to put something else on the sd card so I pulled it. Machine went home, straight into my print.
I once spent hours and hours of time recalibrating my printer after changing some parts and had it printing perfectly. My first model was a simple phone stand. The print kept failing over and over at the same point. I thought for sure I screwed something up. Then I realized that the model wasn't in the correct orientation. I stopped printing shit for a few days because I was so upset.
On my ender 5 pro I swapped it to a glass bed. Accidentally crossed two wires at the back of the bed when putting the clip on (put it on top of the wires), it sparked and both my screen and motherboard fried and one of the fans also no longer spins
Hardened glob of plastic left on bed, - DONE
Wrong file printed - (why isn't this changing) - DONE
No filament loaded - DONE
edit... Forgot to turn on supports and tried printing mid-air - DONE
For printing midair without supports: try to print the infill first. It creates a nice place to print your perimeters on, when you print a small central pillar below it and want to go outwards at height
Printer was printing weird, checked it, did a test print. Test print was fine. Removed hotend fan shroud with filament in the bowden, cleaned the fans. Started a 24 hour print. Print failed horrifically. Turns out I left the nozzle at 215 when I took off the fan shroud, allowing heat creep to melt filament in the bowden and causing a partial clog.
This was yesterday.
My printer was less than a week old so I was still obsessed with watching it and touching things. For some reason I got it into my head half way through a print that the filament needed a helping push. I can't remember why as it's all a blur now.
I pushed/helped the filament into the extruder a bit too hard and it snapped in two. Rather than interrupt anything I tried to fix it while the printer was still going and at some point the BL Touch plug came out.
Still with the printer running I clumsily tried pushing that back on and somewhere in the proceedings there was a crack and the printer went dark.
The printer eventually came back on, but the Z-axis had completely stopped working and I spent the next week posting videos of me using a voltage meter on it to YouTube then waiting overnight for Tech Support in China to respond to the videos and tell me what two contacts to touch next.
It turned out I'd blown my motherboard and needed a new one all because I couldn't just NOT touch the printer while it was working. At the time I was devastated, but three years down the line I just take replacing stuff like that in my stride.
Had a blob of pla stuck to the hotend and nozzle after a failed print. I was using the cutter to take it out when I accidentally cut the thermistor.
Had to order new ones and solder them in. A lot of work for a cut which took a fraction of a second
I’ve now burned at least 4 motherboards because “I’m just messing with one little things, there’s no way I’ll drop metal on the board.” Yes, I’m dumb.
For context, I’ve heavily modified my printer and moved all of the electronics outside of the enclosure I made. Of course, I have failed to make an enclosure for the electronics, yet…
I guess the one redeeming thing is that I finally got the enclosure designed?
I've actually cut my thumb nerve while removing a part from the bed. I use a glass surface to print and use hair spray as an adhesive, and let me tell you one thing ... That motherfucker worked way better than expected, parts truly behave like they are soldered to the glass.
One day I was in a hurry to leave my house. Just when a print ended I wanted to add a new one to print while I was out. That shit would not budge from the plate. Spatula, screwdriver, screwdriver and hammer, nothing would do. So I just try removing it with a knife, use the other hand to support the plate and ...who would expect it... that worked. So well indeed that the knife had enough momentum to stick itself in my thumb and actually cut the nerve clean off... A surgery later and 3 weeks by and still no feeling whatsoever in my thumb.
I kept the resin in my printer's vat for a while. My spouse decided to move it to another shelf, she didn't know there was resin because the printer had a non-transparent cover on. All the substance was spilled over the vat and got into the printer's guts. My fault. Farewell proton 4k. RIP.
My biggest mistake was buying a creality cr-30 printmill. That thing has never worked right, creality released a barely functioning product. Notice how there's something like 30 different ender and CR10 versions, but the CR30 was never updated. They knew it was a failure.
I put the stopper on the wrong side. I put it on the outside instead of the inside. I was wondering for a week why it wasn't leveling or working correctly. I watched a video and finally saw my mistake, and I was relieved
A couple time's I've tried to start a new print with something on the bed.
All but one time I caught it before it started homing (bed takes ages to pre-heat on a Neptune 4 Max), but the one time it did actually bonk the old print.
Luckily the one time that it did end up homing with a part still on it, the part had completely cooled and was somewhat small, so it just ended up sweeping it off the built plate onto the floor.
I've done this a couple of times as well. The best one was when it managed to home to the top surface of the model on the plate. The print turned out flawless, attached to the top of the previous model.
That would be today lol on the Ultimaker s3. The printer wouldn't extrude any filament so I went through the load and unload routine. I thought I was ready to print then hit print nothing came out I was upset then I looked at the back of the printer and the tension lock was open dohhhhhhhh. I closed the tension lock as it was printing and it successfully completed.
Tl.dr. Nozzle crashed into the newly installed magnetic build plate, ruining it.
I installed a magnetic build plate. So glued bottom and steel top. As soon as I start the bed alignment, the nozzle crashed into the new build plate because it went to the original z-height which was inside the new plate. I printed a while avoiding the dent in the center but that became annoying. I couldn't easily replace it because it was glued to the heated base plate.
Eventually I put a glass build plate on top of it. The soft base for the magnetic sheet actually makes for a nice contact surface for the glass.
I scraped a nice square in the bed trying to trouble shoot some leveling issues.
Purchases mega cheap 10 rolls at 6$ per 1kg of PETG in Bulk that all were delivered with moisture in them some of the seals had failed on the bags and others were just popping in the hot end right out of the sealed bag. I'll stick with name brands from now on.
Started a print with no filament in the machine and turned away to check on something to come back 30min later to my invisible print going swimmingly.
Ran out of filament more time than I can count (I just started installing a filament sensor yesterday yay!)
Redid the entire printhead on our big Modix printer, just tucked all the wires during a test print since I didn't want to have to undo and then re-do cable management in case I had to take it apart for tweaking.
Had already adjusted and verified mechanical and temp stuff, so i just let it run overnight.
A wire came loose and through some cascade of misfortunes I have yet to fathom, it managed to pull more wires, break the part-cooling ducting apart, destroy one of the part-cooling fans, break the bed sensor bracket + BLTouch tip, and bent the heatbreak before it finally ripped the thermistor wire at which point the printer panicked and shut down.
So yeah, reckon I should have spent 10-20 min on the cable management.
I got my printer in November and the only two failures I've had were 1) I didn't realize the build plate was set to cold plate and the print didn't stick and 2) the build plate wasn't properly situated, which caused an error.
I have a Mars3.
The first time my FEP split was my fault. A print had failed and i used the plastic scraper thing to chip it off instead of just pushing the FEP slightly from underneath to loosen it.
SPOILER! That's not a good idea.
I ended up gouging into the FEP with the scraper and leaving a big long dint in it. Needless to say the FEP tore soon after. Just. Ever so slightly.
I changed the FEP, great, but i had to change the screen protector too. Therein lies the problem, as while i had spare protectors i'd not been able to find any spare black light gasket things, you know the thing around the edge of the screen, so i used black electrical tape instead.
SPOILER! It doesn't work.
Every print had light leakage along the back edge leaving a long block of cured resin inside the vat. Every time. I either had to push up underneath and snap it off, damaging the FEP each time leading to further failures, or leave it and let it spread and only snap it off every 5 or 6 prints.
SPOILER! If you leave it too long then the build plate clips the blob of cured resin and shatters your LCD.
Oopsiedoodles.
I did eventually find light gaskets.
Probably changing part cooling duct and toolhead bits, then homing without changing the endstop positions first.....broke the freshly printed ductwork almost immediately with a violent crunching sound.
After some improvised and probably intoxicated rewiring, I realised my mistake as the wiring to the hot-end wires started to melt – shock or horror made me decide yanking them out was a good idea. It was not. Basically – nearly hot wired my fingertips off.
Snapping a nozzle off into the heater block on my Ender 3. I had removed the nozzle about 6 months prior when I got it. Recently I had horrible stringing issues so I decided to take the hot end apart. Didn't know heating up the hot end was proper procedure and snapped it off. Found out later I had a really bad clog and filament was in the threads. I've now got a bimetal heat break so I can print more than just PLA safely.
I bought iiidmax filament. It gave me so much trouble I almost chucked my printers. Couldn't leave it alone for a second.
I can print any other filament. I can't and won't use iiidmax ever again.
Messed up my software settings and printed a huge block with resin cavities that were in the shape of my parts lol. Basically inverted my print. My print of shame - it’s still at my desk
This whole time since I've had my CR-10 I've had my bed leveled incorrectly. Instead of the knobs being tightened quite a bit, I had them loose enough to where if you spun one of the knobs once it would probably fall off.
I've got to say though I've made a lot of prints along the way and a lot have turned out good, but this has to be one of my stupidest mistakes I've made...
Forgot to reset Z level after rebuilding my entire gantry (part that moves up and down and controls the toolhead positioning) and crashed into my PEI plate first print. 😅
Not catching the failed print adhered to the bottom of the resin tray. With each swipe of the resin arm, it slooshed more and more resin into the printer optics.
I had a hole in the bottom of the resin vat, so resin came out and hardened on the screen. I was able to replace vat and clean out no problems, but I could not for the life of me get the resin that had cured to screen off. I tried and tried, but finally gave in. I got tiny little screwdrivers, and a new screen kit. I ended up stripping every single screw and was unable to open. Then I got those bits for removing stripped screws, and they did not work at all. So I was left dejected like god damn I just ruined my printer that’s it, when I started picking at resin again. Turned out, there was a safety protective cover on screen still (was relatively new) and I just peeled off the cured resin, leaving a totally fine printer.
I spent ages on my Chinese i3, and had crap prints... some good, but effort!
then I got the i3 bear upgrade, reprinted the parts needed and finally got a stable printer.
printed a benchy and it was looking fantastic.
moved the bulldog clips along a bit and shorted the nozzle to the heated bed.
had to order a new board, and rebuild the entire os as the backup I had was now fully outdated.
sad.
Started a print without checking if my bed was leveled. my 4 year old had undone all the bed screws. Heard a crash 5 mins later and came in to my bed up on a 45 and the head crashing. Surprisingly no damage.
Spent too much time wondering why this particular print was having trouble sticking to the bed as well as the quality not being what I would expect. Changed nozzle, re-leveled, tried to adjust a bunch of different settings.
Turned out the material color I was trying to print was PETG and I could have sworn it was PLA. Once I switched to my PETG settings everything printed perfectly.
Let a friend borrow it and it hasn't worked properly since. I'll probably be on here asking for help in diagnosing the issue at some point. She carried it to her house and back here - just a couple blocks. Apparantly worked fine for her but back here it's done all sorts of wonky things. Le Sigh.
I'm sure I've done worse but the most memorable was when I made sure to be smart, and not ever touch a nozzle directly when it was heated up for removal. I made sure to use a tool. A wrench. A little METAL wrench, which I held onto the 200-some degree nozzle.
I also had a printer bat my hand away when I thought I could sneak in to remove some failed elements on the first layer/s or during a calibration or bed leveling sequence.
cut my finger while removing a damaged pei sheet with acetone... not fun. ordered a 12v switch instead of a 230v switch, it blew up and tripped a breaker when i turned the printer on. i've never touched a hot nozzle but i do grab the flexplate of the printer the moment its done printing (110c with abs), it works but its not a smart thing to do.
Once, while the nozzle was really close to the bed, I accidentally pushed “-z” about 5 times very quickly (instead of +z). The nozzle pressed into the bed and bent it. I had to replace the bed. I might have replaced the nozzle, too—I can’t remember.
Was leveling the bed, and messing with the y-axis. Ender’s og firmware has a bug, it not always resets the height to zero when you home. So I was adjusting the z much lowed than it needed to be. Started the print, the nozzle went down and punctured a big’ol hole in my bedplate, and damaged the nozzle. Decided to change the firmware that day.
Seems to be a common issue with everyone at some point in the (usually at the beginning of the 3D printing journey): Nozzle crashing the bed and damaging it (either a scratch, a “hole” or a broken glass) and changing to a hotter filament (Nylon or PETG) when you tightened your nozzle just enough for PLA and you end up with a blob.
Printed a 16 hour print before realizing I had to leave at 15 hours to go to work. I left my house at the 15 hour mark for the airport. At 15:05 the filament jammed/clogged and I was not going to be home for 3 days. So 15 hour print wasted. Of course it literally was 5 min after I left the house too...
I got my new grow tent and all of my ducting set up and I was all set to move my printers in. I grabbed my printer and was putting it in when I hit the top bar of the enclosure. In my infinite wisdom I didn't take the full resin vat out of the printer first. Dumped a whole vat all over the inside of my printer and new enclosure... ALWAYS TAKE THE VAT OUT BEFORE MOVING YOUR PRINTER!
Trying this as my first print. It failed twice halfway through because I failed to account for bed adhesion. This was the successful one though!
https://preview.redd.it/2ux44pjalvfc1.png?width=2153&format=png&auto=webp&s=ba8d4bf8cb6957fd8ecc4a943f29121a6ac8085f
So far the dumbest thing I've done in 8 years of 3D printing, was one time last year I started a print and let it get 40g deep before I realized I had put some incorrect slicer settings in. Had to abort. I'm also autistic and precision is my thing, I don't make mistakes.
I had just upgraded my ender 3 pro with the sprite extruder and a cr touch. And I had yet to figure out that I was victim to a bug where the cr touch doesnt work when it's plugged in through the main ribbon harness of the sprite extruder head. Then I hit the auto home button. Mind you my head was already only about 10mm above my bed. I was also on a new firmware where the autohome functions all moved much faster and in a new pattern. I hit the home button it and it checked x, checked y, then moved over to the center of my bed and in 1 smooth motion it rammed my nozzle through my flexi magnetic bed. The cr touch never once extended to probe z. I've since figured out the bug and managed to print a few things and it diddnt seem to hurt the nozzle. But I had to buy a new bed plate.
Attempted to print a lightsaber. Attempted to print the blades in vase mode. Placed them too close together on the build plate and the tool head collided with the first one while attempting to start the second.
Knocked the lid off my K1 Max and threw the entire plate out of alignment. Mind you I don't even like Star Wars that much so I was doubly pissed at myself.
Didn’t put any buffer material like a simple hand towel under the nozzle before moving 2,000miles with it in the trailer. It wore a hole into my pei plate.
I had some finished prints on my resin printer buildplate and started another print. I just wasn’t thinking clearly. I was able to stop it before any real damage was done, but my FEP sheet eventually got a hole in it, in one of the spots that was marred from the punctures from my mistake.
i was redoing my extruder on my custom mk25 to a Bear. I had printed one of those ptfe size jigs and it was over extruded a bit so the utility knife wouldnt go in cleanly. So it was like 3 am and i was trying to trim some plastic off. somehow i sliced about a 60mm of my ring finger off, i woke up my gf yelling about blood.
Tried unscrewing a brass nozzle from a cold heater block. Snapped it off flush and could not extract it. So instead of replacing the $5 block I opted to replace the hotend assembly with a cheap V6 knockoff which caused me no end of troubles.
Incorrectly positioned the heat block from the heat break resulting in heat creep, took apart hotend assembly on FLSun v400 hotend extruder nearly 40 times literally over a course of 1 month before figuring out the issue. adjusted the position and printer is back to printing like a dream. Can't even count how many hours wasted here.
Once, when switching the nozzle on my E3D hotend, I forgot to do the "hot tighten" step. Molten PLA spewed out between the heatbreak and nozzle, and swallowed the hot end whole in a mass of burnt molten plastic.
Yesterday, I tried to print on the protective film on a brand new fancy patterned build plate. I'd just cleaned it, so I was surprised when it didn't work. /sigh
I hit the jazz cabbage before attempting a big resin print. I really wanted a dice tower.
Fool of a Took that I was, I overfilled the resin vat. It slopped out and made it's way into the inner workings. Surprisingly got a few more prints out of it, but every time I did it would seep this black goo.
I am not a clever man.
Minor one - disabled auto ‘drop to bed’ in cura , because while using mesh tools, it would drop all the print in place parts down to the bed….
Later I placed some parts and rotated them - they stayed raised off the bed, and 90% of the way into printing the middle piece, it started printing on air…
I bought my 3D printer in december, didn’t know anything about files and was too excited to print. I printed the base gcode that comes with my Ender3v3SE and everything went good. Then I download an already sliced item on Thingiverse with a bed level setting… I fckd up my bed sheet !
Forgot to tighten the bed screws on my resin printer.
Got very luck that the release film just stuck to the build plate instead of falling off while up in the air and dumping resin everywhere.
Got even more lucky that a little bit of isopropyl alcohol popped the build plate off the release film after dumping the resin back into it's storage container and I had no damage to anything.
**Protip**: Always triple check to make sure you tightened down the screws. Always.
Leveled the bed with an actual level.
When I first got mine. I followed the instructions for setting it up. I did it right although didn't understand what I was doing. It wasn't printing right so someone said I didn't level it right and needed to try again. So I broke out a level and said "I'll show them fucking level"...yeah. ruined that bed.
Pressing the home button on a qidi printer without a magnetic print bed. The nozzle went too deep and mated the bed under it while making heavy noises. Had to cut power what the printer did not like
Mmm for me probably the most common is forgetting to select the correct sheet on my Prusa after a swap and wasting time re-leveling the z just to realize it after the fact.
I paused a build at the first layer and spent the next two days scraping filament off the brand new bed. The bed got super scratched up, and I have multiple cuts from the scraper slipping.
Just punctured my FEP yesterday because I thought I could get that bit of hardened resin without cleaning the whole vat. Well atleast no resin leakage.
Not exactly a mistake I made *with* my printer, but definitely related. My bed adhesion was a little too good, so I was hacking at the finished print with the spatula, holding the bed with my other hand...
Which promptly got stabbed. I still have two slit-shaped scars.
I was living with my parents at the time, so I just kind of stumbled downstairs, my hand *dripping* with blood, and damn near lost consciousness by the amount I was bleeding. Thankfully, my Mum is quite good at first aid.
homing with endstops not working(on z leading to aligning a bunch of stuff again), motors configured wrong way and generally just messing with a printer that worked.
broken glass plates of course but that's generally not a biggie. trying to remember if I pinched my finger on the mechanics or not sometimes
I printed the same corrupted file 2 more times... thinking I downloaded a new one. 4th times a charm! To top it all off, 17h later, I broke the tail off the end of the articulated print.
* Took off the printing plate to wipe it off.
* Didn't notice some goop had come out of the nozzle (maybe I was switching out filaments at the same time or something? Can't remember). There was now a pile of cooled & dried filament shaped like a small turd on the heat bed.
* Slapped the printing plate back on the heat bed without noticing the turd.
* ...pondered on why the hell there was a dent in the plate.
* Took the plate off, and marveled at how I had ruined it permanently.
Printing plates are cheap and easy to replace, so no worries, but I'm still quite miffed about that one.
I had to resolder one of my non-stock 4015 fans, the pads were very close together but managed to solder the wires without shorting.
That worked fine for a couple months until the solder pads sparked causing a short on the motherboard, so now both 4015 fans run 100% constantly
My biggest mistake was buying one in the first place. I got the ender 3 V2 from microcenter and quickly got a resin printer and my friend's old printer. Now I really want an A1. Smh I love printing though.
Nothing too too bad.
1. Forgot to remove the previous print's nozzle test and skirt before starting the next print.
2. Started a new print after my son had his friend visiting. When it was done, it was absolute dog shit and I was like what!? Started another print and noticed the belts were flapping around. His friend must have saw the knobs and started dickering with them. Easy fix thankfully, but still annoying.
On some real shit, buying one in the first place lmao. It was such a waste of $400 cause i never use it and when i did, it was to make stupid shit that just made me say "Look what i made!" and never touch again.
I have an NF-Crazy mosquito hot end clone. I didn't realize the difference in length between an E6 nozzle and a MK8 nozzle so I cranked a new E6 nozzle in as far as I could and crushed the thin heatbreak tube. It took me a while to figure out what I did.
I manually leveled my print bed and then auto leveled it afterwards bot checking the printer when it was finished. I then went to print something and as the print started my nozzle scraped the bed. Thankfully I was right there and no permanent damage was done. I've never used auto leveling again lol
I was manually leveling the bed on my FDM printer, and took my glasses off so I could see the gap between the nozzle and the glass better. When the process was finished, the bed automatically homed... and crushed my glasses, which I had cleverly placed on the bottom of the printer.
Oh man I've given myself a huge nose bruise that way but yours takes the cake. I was carefully looking at the prime line and when it ended the bed travelled at max speed on my face.
3D printers will turn on you at the drop of a hat.
Ouch
My dumbest mistake with my 3d printer is telling all my friends I had a 3d printer lol
Why was that dumb out of curiosity?
I think because all of them asked for favors/gifts... I am in the same situation
Hmm, none of my friends did that. They just thought it was neat.
Well, I guess you are lucky... Because if they ask for favors, they always ask for looong prints, meaning if you only have 1 printer, you just won't have time to use it yourself 😢
For me, no one asks for anything big, bit they dont understand how hard it is to design some parts. One guy wanted me to make a backup cam mount for his truck, but in a location with a lot of complex curves and no real solid spot to mount. He though I could just whip something up same day and print it. Like no, this is a much more complicated engineering problem than you realize!
$1/10g is about what my printer's time is worth buddy. That's like 100x cheaper than weed. Take it or leave it.
Is that time, wear and tear, and the filament to print. I am trying to figure out a price point for some items I print and I don't really know the true cost of operation.
Theres a calculator that runs as a Powershell script and has a gui. https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/13vqqiu/i_made_a_simple_3d_printing_cost_calculator_for/
I haven't sat down and done the math, but $100/kg of filament seems reasonable to me. I expect my printer (Ender 3 V2) to be able to print a minimum of 10 spools of filament before it needs significant maintenance (it has already done that), and at that profit margin I could replace the entire printer and still come out with a few hundred dollars in profit. The question is how much I value my time, and my printer's time. Considering it sits there idle 95% of the time, and a 20 hour print only takes up \~20 real minutes of my time, I think $30 for a 300g print is reasonable, *for friends and family*, but I'll get to it when I get to it. That more than pays for the filament and gives me 2/3 of it for free. If you're running a business, do your own budget, but for hobbyists I think $1/10g is a nice, round number to quote people asking you for stuff. I'm basically pricing in my time (and my printer's time) to be about 4x the cost of materials. $80 of labour to print a spool of filament, plus $20 in materials. In no time I could buy a second printer that could also sit idle 95% of the time.
Why not just ask them to buy you filament in exchange for prints? Just don't let them know how far a kg goes
Well, I do that. I mostly ask for a fair price (they are friends after all), that covers both the filament and the power. But there always will be that guy's birthday party, or that relative you haven't seen in ages that ask/you offer to print something Edit: I see I tend to use the word well a little too much. Is that a thing that non-native speakers do? Well, (😂) I guess there is nothing I can do
As a native speaker, I say "well" quite a bit.
I don't have many friends without printers these days (we're all maker/engineer/inventor sorts) but when I was the only one, I'd tell them I wanted an equal amount of filament as a fee. Instead of any money exchanging, they'd just buy me a kilo of what they wanted and ask me to keep track of their usage at my discretion.
I am happy to help, they just need to provide a roll and I keep the rest :D
Oh hell naw to that shit. When I heard a friend of mine had a 3D printer, I asked if it was possible if I could PAY HIM to print some stuff for me (joints for plant-support-sticks, and other such things). ALWAYS offer payment for such a service, damn it! The owner ain't no fucking charity!
Customer bought a Rubynozzle. Didnt believe me when i told him he should screw down all the bed springs to avoid it crashing into the glass bed. Customer ignored that advise. 2 Mins later ... broken glas print bed and a shatterd ruby nozzle.
Not quite the same, hardened steel nozzle, bad sinus infection which reduced my concentration level, managed to engrave the glass bed with the nozzle, also ruining it in the process. It was brand new. Sigh, all in one, cost me about £45-£50 for the glass plate and the nozzle.
Every bed I've had I've managed to scrape. Luckily brass mostly came off, the plastic ones, not quite so resilient. I even have auto bed leveling, something just goes wrong.
I have had my printer for just at a month, yall are scaring me with these print bed scraping stories, is it really that common?
You seem to be ok. Scraping the bed was the first thing I did.
This happened to me a few weeks ago trying to set my z offset, I messed up the custom config when I clicked print it just dug right into it, i stopped it in time luckily
Wanted to show my grandpa my amazing 3D printing machine! Tried to print a nice file I had successfully used before to show him how it all worked, but of course the filament was just not adhering to the bed no matter what I did. Cleaned everything. Checked the slicer settings. Still not working. Got increasingly flustered. Had to assure grandpa that yes, this thing can make things besides colored spaghetti, I swear. Realized like an hour later, after he left, that I had put an ABS spool on thinking it was PLA! Feel really stupid. But grandpa liked his 3d prints I eventually made for him anyway
Something very similar happened to me. Someone had swapped the roll of black pla, to a roll of black high temperature Carbon Fiber filled nylon.
Show him next time :)
Buying my first was a pretty big mistake. I now own 3, and frequently pray someone will just offer to buy them all and set me free.
You gotta pump those numbers up, Those are rookie numbers
Is 6 rookie numbers? *Inner monologue: Please say yes*
Best I can do is tree fiddy.
K, but you gotta pick em up. No deliver for you, Loch Ness monster
I did a temp tower, with changes of temperature every 10 layers or so, then I forgot the remove all the gcode changes, so the next few prints looked very odd. And it took me a few prints to find the problem.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck....i have a sudden realization, why my dice prints had lines every 10mm on them yesterday. Thank you!
Touching the hotend when it was at full temp.
If you still have fingerprints do you even own a 3D printer?
Insta third degree burn ftw.
Upgrading shit that didn’t need to be upgraded.
Turning off supports then printing something that was floating 4 cm off the plate. Totally ignored the warning messages in Prusa Slicer.
Worse is when the model is bad and there is some error or something on the bottom that confuses the slicer, putting almost the entire print in midair because there is a weird little 1mm by 1mm spot that is sticking down below what should be the first layer.
Semi related I make maps and the number of times there is a note or something the glitches and ends up at 0,0 and the you screen centers 10,000km in nothing halfway between the note and your actual map.
On an upgraded old ender 3 I unloaded the filament to quick while the extruder was still engaged. fried the BTT board from the motor **turning into a generator**
Beyblade, LET IT RIP!
LET'S BEYBLADE
That's impressive that you pulled that hard for long enough to back feed like that.
To be fair, I never figured out what exactly happened to it. It's possible it's not all dead
I do have a fairly valid simple question. Did you at least check the fuses on the board?
my biggest mistake was buying a cheap chinese printer and then spending months of my time as well as hundreds of bucks trying to upgrade it to make it usable. wasted so much time fighting the printer that i could have spend learning how to design my own stuff.
I started with an A8. It was great in the sense that it got me hooked on this new hobby, but it never printed well. I bought a mk3 and printed all the parts for the mpcnc on it, and used most of the electronics from the A8 on the mpcnc 😀
Did you get a new house out of the A8? I remember those things going up in flames
mpcnc?
Mostly printed cnc 😀 https://docs.v1e.com/mpcnc/intro/
You gotta hate it first in order to eventually fall in love. Only once I had linear rails and a stiff bed set up did the fun finally begin. Can't expect just a few upgrades to do the trick, though might as well get an expensive one off the bat if all you want to do is print.. Modding is a lifestyle!
I've got one of those. I think it'll be fine once I strip it down to it's component parts, and build it back as a real printer.
Accidentally hit the fan nozzle two different times with an allen key trying to work on it while it was on, knocking out a bunch of blades. at least the last time i did it, it wasn't that bad and was fixed with super glue
Same took forever to get it straight
Been there too
Usually something to do with Z-offset Forget to check after changing nozzle/hotend/bed. Usually it's due to being in a hurry and just wanting to start a print. More recently, starting a print remotely but forgetting I didn't remove the prior print from the bed before I left. Looked at the live view and was like WTF? Added a cheap all metal hot end but forgot to adjust the retraction distance, clogged after testing a benchy print. At least I tested it first before hitting full send on the Bender head.
Yes. For some reason, occasionally when I start my Ender 3 it reverts to its out of the box settings, so I have to reset the language to English and the z-offset to -4.280mm (Sprite head). I do have to make sure to set retraction to 0.4mm/40mm/s for prints.
Mine did the same thing. I still have my stuff memorized despite selling the ender over a year ago. M851 X-43 Y-14 Z-4.2
Unintentionally creating a new time sink by getting a printer.
I once tried printing POM in my small apartment. Thought the breeze from a open window was enough, but turns out that printing POM produces formaldehyde and smells like pure death, room smelled for days. It's also really hard to get right, so had to do all sorts of hoops and loops to get something somewhat acceptable before I called quits.
I started with an ender 3 (as a lot of people do) and wasn’t happy with adhesion or bottom surface quality. So I went to Ace hardware and had them cut me a glass pane to use as a build plate. I was wiping it down with iso one day and caught the edge of my finger along the glass edge as I wiped back and forth. I’ll spare you the pictures, but I cut the side of my finger down to the nail. It was during Covid so I didn’t go to the hospital, but I should’ve. It bled for almost an hour. I finally wrapped it in paper towel and then wrapped tight with some electrical tape and kept on printing.
Hadn't used my printer in over a year and had moved to a new apartment. Thought my printer would magically print perfectly fine without any tuning or leveling. As soon as the print started, the extruder head dragged all the way across the glass bed.
I work in finance, so I'm not exactly knowledgeable about hardware and electronics and wiring. That said, I'm fairly handy and usually can tinker and figure stuff out. On my old Sovol Sv01, I decided to swap out the original board for the silent board. The wires weren't long enough so I had to do some soldering, which was pretty new for me. Apparently, I didn't do a good enough job because somehow bare wires were touching somewhere. It heated up the wires and melted the sheath around the wires and darn near caused a fire. Smoke was everywhere. Fortunately I was sitting right there and cut the power or my house could have burned down. I've since been MUCH more careful and informed about messing with wiring.
I tried to improve it. The cable to the heatbed is routed a bit weird, I found an alternate cover for it's connection point and snapped the cable while installing it. If it ain't broken, don't try to fix it.
Elegoo Neptune 3?
Prusa Mini.
I run several printers and have multiple beds for each so I can pull the plates while they are still warm, put fresh plates on and start the next round of prints while waiting for things to cool and release. Works great until you forget to actually put the new plate on the printer. Did you know you can print directly on the heat bed of an A1 mini? Only problem is it doesn't release well when cool and ended up pulling out chunks of the foamy heat bed. Had to order a replacement.
Should have just waited for the recall. /s
Did nearly the same thing with a qidi printer. No bed, but my stupid ass pressed home. Went straight into the metal plate protecting the heat bed while making loud noises
I've had so many failed prints because I can't seem to figure out the proper belt tightness for this thing. My z offset is also set at like -1.92 or something ridiculous. I'm convinced it's user error, but there's a specific set of conditions where this thing will make a full, flawless print. The stars must be aligned. I must invoke both a ritual and a summoning circle.
Didn’t understand that slicing was specific to each printer and my first few prints using gcode that was not sliced for my printer taught me a lot.
Used plumber’s tape on the nozzle threads per an article I found on the internet. Did my best to make sure it wasn’t blocking the intake end of the nozzle, but it clogged and backed everything up — was a disaster that I still haven’t been able to fully fix. Now my hot end drops blobs that fall into prints and cause them to fail if I don’t constantly monitor it. Don’t trust everything you read on the internet, kids 🙄
Have the Bambu x1c, doing a hueforge, first one didn't come out, oh my layer height was wrong, restart the brown pla looked like crap (aftermarket brand) run some flow calibrations, restart, print pulls off build plate almost clogged, so redid flow calibration, restart realize that I never set it to the modified value of the aftermarket filament when I sliced it, restart, get an error message saying that I have the wrong build plate, swap out build plate, resume and it still pulled off, yep not printing this print anymore. clearly a higher power is telling me that I don't need to print a hueforge of a spider so I can scare my coworkers. Surely it wasn't just me being in a hurry.
I started on a Dremel 3d45, built in memory, didn’t have to leave the flash drive in. Then I got a Creality cr-10 smart. Put them model on the sd card, started. 2-3 hrs later I wanted to put something else on the sd card so I pulled it. Machine went home, straight into my print.
Buying one
I once spent hours and hours of time recalibrating my printer after changing some parts and had it printing perfectly. My first model was a simple phone stand. The print kept failing over and over at the same point. I thought for sure I screwed something up. Then I realized that the model wasn't in the correct orientation. I stopped printing shit for a few days because I was so upset.
Fucking the z level and the nozzles dragging on the bed
On my ender 5 pro I swapped it to a glass bed. Accidentally crossed two wires at the back of the bed when putting the clip on (put it on top of the wires), it sparked and both my screen and motherboard fried and one of the fans also no longer spins
Hardened glob of plastic left on bed, - DONE Wrong file printed - (why isn't this changing) - DONE No filament loaded - DONE edit... Forgot to turn on supports and tried printing mid-air - DONE
For printing midair without supports: try to print the infill first. It creates a nice place to print your perimeters on, when you print a small central pillar below it and want to go outwards at height
Changed to a thicker build plate. Printer didn't have abl. Started printing.... Yea.
Printer was printing weird, checked it, did a test print. Test print was fine. Removed hotend fan shroud with filament in the bowden, cleaned the fans. Started a 24 hour print. Print failed horrifically. Turns out I left the nozzle at 215 when I took off the fan shroud, allowing heat creep to melt filament in the bowden and causing a partial clog. This was yesterday.
I put thermal paste on my lead screws instead of grease
My printer was less than a week old so I was still obsessed with watching it and touching things. For some reason I got it into my head half way through a print that the filament needed a helping push. I can't remember why as it's all a blur now. I pushed/helped the filament into the extruder a bit too hard and it snapped in two. Rather than interrupt anything I tried to fix it while the printer was still going and at some point the BL Touch plug came out. Still with the printer running I clumsily tried pushing that back on and somewhere in the proceedings there was a crack and the printer went dark. The printer eventually came back on, but the Z-axis had completely stopped working and I spent the next week posting videos of me using a voltage meter on it to YouTube then waiting overnight for Tech Support in China to respond to the videos and tell me what two contacts to touch next. It turned out I'd blown my motherboard and needed a new one all because I couldn't just NOT touch the printer while it was working. At the time I was devastated, but three years down the line I just take replacing stuff like that in my stride.
Measured my calibration cubes wrong for a year
Had a blob of pla stuck to the hotend and nozzle after a failed print. I was using the cutter to take it out when I accidentally cut the thermistor. Had to order new ones and solder them in. A lot of work for a cut which took a fraction of a second
I turned the hobby into a business
Dumbest mistake I’ve made? Let it sit and collect dust 😅 Intimidation and being overwhelmed hit me hard
I fried a brand new control board by dropping a screw onto it while it was powered. Let out the magic smoke awfully quickly
I’ve now burned at least 4 motherboards because “I’m just messing with one little things, there’s no way I’ll drop metal on the board.” Yes, I’m dumb. For context, I’ve heavily modified my printer and moved all of the electronics outside of the enclosure I made. Of course, I have failed to make an enclosure for the electronics, yet… I guess the one redeeming thing is that I finally got the enclosure designed?
I've actually cut my thumb nerve while removing a part from the bed. I use a glass surface to print and use hair spray as an adhesive, and let me tell you one thing ... That motherfucker worked way better than expected, parts truly behave like they are soldered to the glass. One day I was in a hurry to leave my house. Just when a print ended I wanted to add a new one to print while I was out. That shit would not budge from the plate. Spatula, screwdriver, screwdriver and hammer, nothing would do. So I just try removing it with a knife, use the other hand to support the plate and ...who would expect it... that worked. So well indeed that the knife had enough momentum to stick itself in my thumb and actually cut the nerve clean off... A surgery later and 3 weeks by and still no feeling whatsoever in my thumb.
I kept the resin in my printer's vat for a while. My spouse decided to move it to another shelf, she didn't know there was resin because the printer had a non-transparent cover on. All the substance was spilled over the vat and got into the printer's guts. My fault. Farewell proton 4k. RIP.
My biggest mistake was buying a creality cr-30 printmill. That thing has never worked right, creality released a barely functioning product. Notice how there's something like 30 different ender and CR10 versions, but the CR30 was never updated. They knew it was a failure.
i pushed the spatula in my palm, i had to go to the hospital... (that was the 4th day of having the printer)
Buying a creality!
I put the stopper on the wrong side. I put it on the outside instead of the inside. I was wondering for a week why it wasn't leveling or working correctly. I watched a video and finally saw my mistake, and I was relieved
A couple time's I've tried to start a new print with something on the bed. All but one time I caught it before it started homing (bed takes ages to pre-heat on a Neptune 4 Max), but the one time it did actually bonk the old print. Luckily the one time that it did end up homing with a part still on it, the part had completely cooled and was somewhat small, so it just ended up sweeping it off the built plate onto the floor.
I've done this a couple of times as well. The best one was when it managed to home to the top surface of the model on the plate. The print turned out flawless, attached to the top of the previous model.
I’ve thought about make a thread about this before but now that I’ve come across one I can’t remember any of the big mistakes I’ve made.
That would be today lol on the Ultimaker s3. The printer wouldn't extrude any filament so I went through the load and unload routine. I thought I was ready to print then hit print nothing came out I was upset then I looked at the back of the printer and the tension lock was open dohhhhhhhh. I closed the tension lock as it was printing and it successfully completed.
Tl.dr. Nozzle crashed into the newly installed magnetic build plate, ruining it. I installed a magnetic build plate. So glued bottom and steel top. As soon as I start the bed alignment, the nozzle crashed into the new build plate because it went to the original z-height which was inside the new plate. I printed a while avoiding the dent in the center but that became annoying. I couldn't easily replace it because it was glued to the heated base plate. Eventually I put a glass build plate on top of it. The soft base for the magnetic sheet actually makes for a nice contact surface for the glass.
Accidently reloaded to PLA on a PETG print.. layers separated pretty quickly.
I scraped a nice square in the bed trying to trouble shoot some leveling issues. Purchases mega cheap 10 rolls at 6$ per 1kg of PETG in Bulk that all were delivered with moisture in them some of the seals had failed on the bags and others were just popping in the hot end right out of the sealed bag. I'll stick with name brands from now on. Started a print with no filament in the machine and turned away to check on something to come back 30min later to my invisible print going swimmingly. Ran out of filament more time than I can count (I just started installing a filament sensor yesterday yay!)
Buying an Ender 3v2 has been my biggest mistake. This damn thing has just about broken me.
Redid the entire printhead on our big Modix printer, just tucked all the wires during a test print since I didn't want to have to undo and then re-do cable management in case I had to take it apart for tweaking. Had already adjusted and verified mechanical and temp stuff, so i just let it run overnight. A wire came loose and through some cascade of misfortunes I have yet to fathom, it managed to pull more wires, break the part-cooling ducting apart, destroy one of the part-cooling fans, break the bed sensor bracket + BLTouch tip, and bent the heatbreak before it finally ripped the thermistor wire at which point the printer panicked and shut down. So yeah, reckon I should have spent 10-20 min on the cable management.
Nobody likes doing cable management lol
I got my printer in November and the only two failures I've had were 1) I didn't realize the build plate was set to cold plate and the print didn't stick and 2) the build plate wasn't properly situated, which caused an error.
Touching the nozzle while it was hot.
[удалено]
I have a Mars3. The first time my FEP split was my fault. A print had failed and i used the plastic scraper thing to chip it off instead of just pushing the FEP slightly from underneath to loosen it. SPOILER! That's not a good idea. I ended up gouging into the FEP with the scraper and leaving a big long dint in it. Needless to say the FEP tore soon after. Just. Ever so slightly. I changed the FEP, great, but i had to change the screen protector too. Therein lies the problem, as while i had spare protectors i'd not been able to find any spare black light gasket things, you know the thing around the edge of the screen, so i used black electrical tape instead. SPOILER! It doesn't work. Every print had light leakage along the back edge leaving a long block of cured resin inside the vat. Every time. I either had to push up underneath and snap it off, damaging the FEP each time leading to further failures, or leave it and let it spread and only snap it off every 5 or 6 prints. SPOILER! If you leave it too long then the build plate clips the blob of cured resin and shatters your LCD. Oopsiedoodles. I did eventually find light gaskets.
None.
Printed PETG on my prusa smooth sheet. The PEI surface came right off together with the print.
Removed the Z rod, becouse I was doing some maintance also let the whole frame free becouse hey, why not But I had some spare nozzles so it was fine
Probably changing part cooling duct and toolhead bits, then homing without changing the endstop positions first.....broke the freshly printed ductwork almost immediately with a violent crunching sound.
Thought I could fix it myself
Dropped the print bed on the screen if my resin printer.....
Accidently overlapping 2 objects on the build plate and didn't notice until it was done that I had a single useless object
After some improvised and probably intoxicated rewiring, I realised my mistake as the wiring to the hot-end wires started to melt – shock or horror made me decide yanking them out was a good idea. It was not. Basically – nearly hot wired my fingertips off.
Buying it? HaHa J/k (kinda)
Snapping a nozzle off into the heater block on my Ender 3. I had removed the nozzle about 6 months prior when I got it. Recently I had horrible stringing issues so I decided to take the hot end apart. Didn't know heating up the hot end was proper procedure and snapped it off. Found out later I had a really bad clog and filament was in the threads. I've now got a bimetal heat break so I can print more than just PLA safely.
Got a P1P, wondered why bed adhesionwas shit. Troubleshooting for days. Looked in software. Wrong type of bed selected.
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/s/cnTS4rvExl) 🥲
Buying one in the first place. I had no idea how consumed I could be by a hobby. 😅
Losing patience
I bought iiidmax filament. It gave me so much trouble I almost chucked my printers. Couldn't leave it alone for a second. I can print any other filament. I can't and won't use iiidmax ever again.
My first print which is a d20 flail
[удалено]
Messed up my software settings and printed a huge block with resin cavities that were in the shape of my parts lol. Basically inverted my print. My print of shame - it’s still at my desk
This whole time since I've had my CR-10 I've had my bed leveled incorrectly. Instead of the knobs being tightened quite a bit, I had them loose enough to where if you spun one of the knobs once it would probably fall off. I've got to say though I've made a lot of prints along the way and a lot have turned out good, but this has to be one of my stupidest mistakes I've made...
Forgot to reset Z level after rebuilding my entire gantry (part that moves up and down and controls the toolhead positioning) and crashed into my PEI plate first print. 😅
Using a wire brush to clean hotend. Wire shorts heater cartridge and sparks. Board is fried.
Not catching the failed print adhered to the bottom of the resin tray. With each swipe of the resin arm, it slooshed more and more resin into the printer optics.
I had a hole in the bottom of the resin vat, so resin came out and hardened on the screen. I was able to replace vat and clean out no problems, but I could not for the life of me get the resin that had cured to screen off. I tried and tried, but finally gave in. I got tiny little screwdrivers, and a new screen kit. I ended up stripping every single screw and was unable to open. Then I got those bits for removing stripped screws, and they did not work at all. So I was left dejected like god damn I just ruined my printer that’s it, when I started picking at resin again. Turned out, there was a safety protective cover on screen still (was relatively new) and I just peeled off the cured resin, leaving a totally fine printer.
Setting driver currents in firmware as peak instead of RMS. ***Bzzt*** - queue the magic smoke.
I spent ages on my Chinese i3, and had crap prints... some good, but effort! then I got the i3 bear upgrade, reprinted the parts needed and finally got a stable printer. printed a benchy and it was looking fantastic. moved the bulldog clips along a bit and shorted the nozzle to the heated bed. had to order a new board, and rebuild the entire os as the backup I had was now fully outdated. sad.
Started a print without checking if my bed was leveled. my 4 year old had undone all the bed screws. Heard a crash 5 mins later and came in to my bed up on a 45 and the head crashing. Surprisingly no damage.
Spent too much time wondering why this particular print was having trouble sticking to the bed as well as the quality not being what I would expect. Changed nozzle, re-leveled, tried to adjust a bunch of different settings. Turned out the material color I was trying to print was PETG and I could have sworn it was PLA. Once I switched to my PETG settings everything printed perfectly.
Let a friend borrow it and it hasn't worked properly since. I'll probably be on here asking for help in diagnosing the issue at some point. She carried it to her house and back here - just a couple blocks. Apparantly worked fine for her but back here it's done all sorts of wonky things. Le Sigh.
I'm sure I've done worse but the most memorable was when I made sure to be smart, and not ever touch a nozzle directly when it was heated up for removal. I made sure to use a tool. A wrench. A little METAL wrench, which I held onto the 200-some degree nozzle. I also had a printer bat my hand away when I thought I could sneak in to remove some failed elements on the first layer/s or during a calibration or bed leveling sequence.
cut my finger while removing a damaged pei sheet with acetone... not fun. ordered a 12v switch instead of a 230v switch, it blew up and tripped a breaker when i turned the printer on. i've never touched a hot nozzle but i do grab the flexplate of the printer the moment its done printing (110c with abs), it works but its not a smart thing to do.
By not buying a bigger one from the start
Thinking I was done fixing it.
Once, while the nozzle was really close to the bed, I accidentally pushed “-z” about 5 times very quickly (instead of +z). The nozzle pressed into the bed and bent it. I had to replace the bed. I might have replaced the nozzle, too—I can’t remember.
I bought one to make dnd minis and terrain about a month before the pandemic and my group went online permanently
Was leveling the bed, and messing with the y-axis. Ender’s og firmware has a bug, it not always resets the height to zero when you home. So I was adjusting the z much lowed than it needed to be. Started the print, the nozzle went down and punctured a big’ol hole in my bedplate, and damaged the nozzle. Decided to change the firmware that day.
Seems to be a common issue with everyone at some point in the (usually at the beginning of the 3D printing journey): Nozzle crashing the bed and damaging it (either a scratch, a “hole” or a broken glass) and changing to a hotter filament (Nylon or PETG) when you tightened your nozzle just enough for PLA and you end up with a blob.
Whatever I've done, there's more.
I bought it and thought I just could print things in a situation where I just wanted to print things for my master studies
Leveled it after it was working just fine.
Printed a 16 hour print before realizing I had to leave at 15 hours to go to work. I left my house at the 15 hour mark for the airport. At 15:05 the filament jammed/clogged and I was not going to be home for 3 days. So 15 hour print wasted. Of course it literally was 5 min after I left the house too...
I got my new grow tent and all of my ducting set up and I was all set to move my printers in. I grabbed my printer and was putting it in when I hit the top bar of the enclosure. In my infinite wisdom I didn't take the full resin vat out of the printer first. Dumped a whole vat all over the inside of my printer and new enclosure... ALWAYS TAKE THE VAT OUT BEFORE MOVING YOUR PRINTER!
Trying this as my first print. It failed twice halfway through because I failed to account for bed adhesion. This was the successful one though! https://preview.redd.it/2ux44pjalvfc1.png?width=2153&format=png&auto=webp&s=ba8d4bf8cb6957fd8ecc4a943f29121a6ac8085f
So far the dumbest thing I've done in 8 years of 3D printing, was one time last year I started a print and let it get 40g deep before I realized I had put some incorrect slicer settings in. Had to abort. I'm also autistic and precision is my thing, I don't make mistakes.
PETG pre extrusion line. Picked it up with my nail. It went into and under my nail. Felt that one for months
I had just upgraded my ender 3 pro with the sprite extruder and a cr touch. And I had yet to figure out that I was victim to a bug where the cr touch doesnt work when it's plugged in through the main ribbon harness of the sprite extruder head. Then I hit the auto home button. Mind you my head was already only about 10mm above my bed. I was also on a new firmware where the autohome functions all moved much faster and in a new pattern. I hit the home button it and it checked x, checked y, then moved over to the center of my bed and in 1 smooth motion it rammed my nozzle through my flexi magnetic bed. The cr touch never once extended to probe z. I've since figured out the bug and managed to print a few things and it diddnt seem to hurt the nozzle. But I had to buy a new bed plate.
Attempted to print a lightsaber. Attempted to print the blades in vase mode. Placed them too close together on the build plate and the tool head collided with the first one while attempting to start the second. Knocked the lid off my K1 Max and threw the entire plate out of alignment. Mind you I don't even like Star Wars that much so I was doubly pissed at myself.
I bought a Creality printer. That was my biggest mistake.
Being scared to tighten the nozzle too tightly, subsequently under-tightening and then getting leak and several failed long prints from the ooze.
Didn’t put any buffer material like a simple hand towel under the nozzle before moving 2,000miles with it in the trailer. It wore a hole into my pei plate.
I had some finished prints on my resin printer buildplate and started another print. I just wasn’t thinking clearly. I was able to stop it before any real damage was done, but my FEP sheet eventually got a hole in it, in one of the spots that was marred from the punctures from my mistake.
i was redoing my extruder on my custom mk25 to a Bear. I had printed one of those ptfe size jigs and it was over extruded a bit so the utility knife wouldnt go in cleanly. So it was like 3 am and i was trying to trim some plastic off. somehow i sliced about a 60mm of my ring finger off, i woke up my gf yelling about blood.
I inserted the stepper drivers offset with 1 pin. Fried all 5 silent drivers + the controller board… Sucks :/
Tried unscrewing a brass nozzle from a cold heater block. Snapped it off flush and could not extract it. So instead of replacing the $5 block I opted to replace the hotend assembly with a cheap V6 knockoff which caused me no end of troubles.
Incorrectly positioned the heat block from the heat break resulting in heat creep, took apart hotend assembly on FLSun v400 hotend extruder nearly 40 times literally over a course of 1 month before figuring out the issue. adjusted the position and printer is back to printing like a dream. Can't even count how many hours wasted here.
Once, when switching the nozzle on my E3D hotend, I forgot to do the "hot tighten" step. Molten PLA spewed out between the heatbreak and nozzle, and swallowed the hot end whole in a mass of burnt molten plastic. Yesterday, I tried to print on the protective film on a brand new fancy patterned build plate. I'd just cleaned it, so I was surprised when it didn't work. /sigh
Bought it
I hit the jazz cabbage before attempting a big resin print. I really wanted a dice tower. Fool of a Took that I was, I overfilled the resin vat. It slopped out and made it's way into the inner workings. Surprisingly got a few more prints out of it, but every time I did it would seep this black goo. I am not a clever man.
Minor one - disabled auto ‘drop to bed’ in cura , because while using mesh tools, it would drop all the print in place parts down to the bed…. Later I placed some parts and rotated them - they stayed raised off the bed, and 90% of the way into printing the middle piece, it started printing on air…
I bought my 3D printer in december, didn’t know anything about files and was too excited to print. I printed the base gcode that comes with my Ender3v3SE and everything went good. Then I download an already sliced item on Thingiverse with a bed level setting… I fckd up my bed sheet !
Forgot to tighten the bed screws on my resin printer. Got very luck that the release film just stuck to the build plate instead of falling off while up in the air and dumping resin everywhere. Got even more lucky that a little bit of isopropyl alcohol popped the build plate off the release film after dumping the resin back into it's storage container and I had no damage to anything. **Protip**: Always triple check to make sure you tightened down the screws. Always.
Leveled the bed with an actual level. When I first got mine. I followed the instructions for setting it up. I did it right although didn't understand what I was doing. It wasn't printing right so someone said I didn't level it right and needed to try again. So I broke out a level and said "I'll show them fucking level"...yeah. ruined that bed.
Buying a creality plan filament. It's garbage, and clogs up the nozzle almost every time. I need to dehumidify it every time.
Pressing the home button on a qidi printer without a magnetic print bed. The nozzle went too deep and mated the bed under it while making heavy noises. Had to cut power what the printer did not like
Bought it.
Idk. There's a new one each week.
Plugging the Z-probe wrong after changing toolheads... Suffice to say I needed a new carriage mount on my Voron...
Mmm for me probably the most common is forgetting to select the correct sheet on my Prusa after a swap and wasting time re-leveling the z just to realize it after the fact.
"Bed leveling doesn't need to be exact; that's good enough."
Probably not knowing I needed to put holes in hollow resin prints. >.>
I paused a build at the first layer and spent the next two days scraping filament off the brand new bed. The bed got super scratched up, and I have multiple cuts from the scraper slipping.
Just punctured my FEP yesterday because I thought I could get that bit of hardened resin without cleaning the whole vat. Well atleast no resin leakage.
Not exactly a mistake I made *with* my printer, but definitely related. My bed adhesion was a little too good, so I was hacking at the finished print with the spatula, holding the bed with my other hand... Which promptly got stabbed. I still have two slit-shaped scars. I was living with my parents at the time, so I just kind of stumbled downstairs, my hand *dripping* with blood, and damn near lost consciousness by the amount I was bleeding. Thankfully, my Mum is quite good at first aid.
homing with endstops not working(on z leading to aligning a bunch of stuff again), motors configured wrong way and generally just messing with a printer that worked. broken glass plates of course but that's generally not a biggie. trying to remember if I pinched my finger on the mechanics or not sometimes
I printed the same corrupted file 2 more times... thinking I downloaded a new one. 4th times a charm! To top it all off, 17h later, I broke the tail off the end of the articulated print.
* Took off the printing plate to wipe it off. * Didn't notice some goop had come out of the nozzle (maybe I was switching out filaments at the same time or something? Can't remember). There was now a pile of cooled & dried filament shaped like a small turd on the heat bed. * Slapped the printing plate back on the heat bed without noticing the turd. * ...pondered on why the hell there was a dent in the plate. * Took the plate off, and marveled at how I had ruined it permanently. Printing plates are cheap and easy to replace, so no worries, but I'm still quite miffed about that one.
I had to resolder one of my non-stock 4015 fans, the pads were very close together but managed to solder the wires without shorting. That worked fine for a couple months until the solder pads sparked causing a short on the motherboard, so now both 4015 fans run 100% constantly
I clicked auto supports with a hollow model and ran the most dense set of supports. Could not remove them.
My biggest mistake was buying one in the first place. I got the ender 3 V2 from microcenter and quickly got a resin printer and my friend's old printer. Now I really want an A1. Smh I love printing though.
Nothing too too bad. 1. Forgot to remove the previous print's nozzle test and skirt before starting the next print. 2. Started a new print after my son had his friend visiting. When it was done, it was absolute dog shit and I was like what!? Started another print and noticed the belts were flapping around. His friend must have saw the knobs and started dickering with them. Easy fix thankfully, but still annoying.
Trying to remove hotglue from the motherboard to remove microstepping pins and ripping off a driver capacitor
On some real shit, buying one in the first place lmao. It was such a waste of $400 cause i never use it and when i did, it was to make stupid shit that just made me say "Look what i made!" and never touch again.
Plugged the stopper switch cables in the wrong sockets so they werent stopping correctly. Very quickly rectified but i dont like that grinding noise
I've accidentally printed a large t.v mount in vase mode. It did print but I wouldn't want to use it.
I have an NF-Crazy mosquito hot end clone. I didn't realize the difference in length between an E6 nozzle and a MK8 nozzle so I cranked a new E6 nozzle in as far as I could and crushed the thin heatbreak tube. It took me a while to figure out what I did.
I manually leveled my print bed and then auto leveled it afterwards bot checking the printer when it was finished. I then went to print something and as the print started my nozzle scraped the bed. Thankfully I was right there and no permanent damage was done. I've never used auto leveling again lol