The setup is the first stage of the 3D printing operational strategy lectures we will cover. It's a tricky one, the most nebulous of the six stages. It's less about the specific job itself and more about the context, and environment for 3D printing your projects. Or to be more specific, the stage is less important for those who don't spend as much time preparing equipment and processes for printing. It is super important for those with more experience and those who use desktop 3D printing as a part of their business. In this stage, we will cover three main topics. Introducing 3D printing, onboarding and installing and maintaining. I listed to setup in the best practice sheets as preparing equipment materials and process readiness, but the most important consideration is preparing all the humans involved in this process including yourself and only yourself if you're working solo for using 3D printing effectively. An emerging from this discussion are the areas mentioned in the checklist lecture and the questions included in the master checklist. The important information gathering about available equipment and strategies that you will draw on throughout the design process, even before you nail down the design scope for your specific project. Some of these considerations challenge you to ask yourself what equipment, software and materials you should use and some flip these questions on their head as an imaginative exercise for setting up your project to best suit what equipment,, software and materials already have at your disposal. If you don't have a calibrated and well-maintained printer or if you don't have a great calibration and printer readiness plan for equipment that is available to you, then this lecture is for you. Failing to solve the mystery of an unmaintained system. It's like shooting yourself in the foot and anything you can do to make sure that you have a basic understanding of equipment will stand you in good stead introducing 3D printing. The first topic in the setup is introducing 3D printing. This element makes the most sense when you are introducing 3D printing to a business or team. But again, even if you are so low, it's worth tuning in. The key question for this topic is how can we benefit from 3D printing? I always hear this in terms of how many ways can we benefit, but some teams do flip it the other way and ask does it actually help us at all to use 3D printing for our projects. I have seen situations where 3D printing is used for an application associated with a team's goals, but their lack of training and resources corners them into paying an outside contractor instead of tackling the project themselves. But after a project or two during which several staff members are trained in CAD, they're able to bring 3D printing in-house and benefit from cost savings. The three subtopics for this area are identified need and use cases. Establish a baseline for printed parts and provision tools, materials and settings. Identify need and use cases, given that 3D printing is a generalist fabrication tool that produces a physical shape from digital design files. There are a lot of potential use cases and applications, regardless what industry you work in. But taking the time to consider what you really need will help you zero in on the necessary equipment, tools, techniques and materials. Establish a baseline for printed parts. What is the baseline result that you and your team are looking to achieve with 3D printing? If you set aside enough time for part printing and post-processing, your goals can be lofty. But placing an overly high expectation for resolution and quality of the models can cripple the value of the technology. The feel that does the best and worst at this simultaneously is architecture. The architecture firms that focus on using this technology for concepts, exploration, massing studies and fast context models emphasizing the role of 3D printing as a secondary citizen to their digital building design files are able to commit to less fussy printing resolutions and benefit from the speed of iteration 3D printing allows. For these firms, designers and architects can fill entire tables with massing studies and sketch models on their route to identifying and then solving the underlying design questions and this cost them less than say the large format photography full color 2D prints needed for the same project. But those who are caught on the idea of producing pristine models for a final client delivery model are missing the boat. When you set this kind of resolution expectation for every model, your quadrupling the printing time and eliminating the value of this technology for rapid iteration. A model shop bites might been months and a hundred grand producing these kinds of flawless prints. Provisioning tools, materials, settings. In the hardware inflected topic, we'll talk about tools and materials as well. But this subtopic is listed here, because similar to the baseline for parts expectations, making a plan for how you will use these tools and who will have access to them and when is almost as important as the hardware commandment itself. Desktop 3D printers have an advantage over similar fabrication tools. Accessibility, reliability and low cost. If you don't plan for users to have easy access or impose restrictions to stop the printing queue at the end of the business day, then you won't really benefit from those features. Take a moment to thank how you can use this technology operationally within your team. Onboarding,, the next primary topic for the setup is onboarding. Onboarding is almost purely operational. Thinking practically, how can you add this technology and all of its capabilities to your team? How can you prepare all of your operators with the best 3D design and printing skills? Here are the four subtopics. Train staff, established shop policy, outline digital pipeline and identify how to get help. Train staff, 3D printers aren't that hard to use. But it is key that everyone using a printer, particularly a shared printer where more than one person depends on it have at least the same onboarding training. Wile this might be a more familiar topic to those who are managing a team or a facility, given that 3D printing arrives businesses, schools and workshops by any means, it may be up to an individual user to take the initiative to reach out to all who are using the equipment to make everyone gets on board the same way. And notice the key elements for how to setup, calibrate execute prints and reset the machine for next use. At most schools and businesses, if you want access to the equipment, you're required to first, complete an onboarding training. The time crunch to use the machines isn't the best time to offer onboarding trading. Though at any facility I've ever seen, the urgent need to print does tend to drive training requests. Establish shop policy. One of the best reasons to get all of the users with access to a machine trained the same way is for the team or facility to implement shop policies. This protects the users, the machines and the productivity of everyone involved. Sure, it might seem silly to have shop policies assigned to a 3D printer, given that typical shot policies are focused on dangerous machines or machines much easier to permanently damage. But a key shop policy I always recommend is a machine reset strategy where every user leaves the machine in good working order ready to load material for the next user. We'll talk more about this in another lecture. The steps for establishing a shot policy involved in defying the elements that need to be tuned in to find. Some key questions, do you leave a specific material mounted on your machine or do you always unload and return your spools to storage? Do you reset nozzles and cores to a standard diameter? Or do you have the machines that are marked specifically for use with other nozzles and course? Who participates in daily, weekly and monthly maintenance of the printers? What are the issues that should be taken care of by an additive tech and what should you be trained to take care of on the spot, so the next user has no problems? Outline digital pipeline. It is always less stressful to test printable models when you're out of the heat of battle, if you will. So if you and your team can spend time checking the various design software you are familiar with and make sure you know how to export a printable file, then you won't have that hanging over your head when you're facing a deadline. The elements you want to consider are these, what primary design tools do you use? Do they have SDL, OBJ, AMF or 3MF export options? Do you have access to a mesh repair or cleanup tool? Meshlab and autodesk meshmixer are free. Have you installed the latest version of the 3D control software's who do to your machine. Do you know how to deliver a file from the control software to your printer? Identify how to get help. While we have an entire lecture dedicated to how to get help, this is a reminder. Locate the means for getting help before help is needed. Later I'll share alternative resources available to you online. But for now, make sure at least that you know how do you get customer support if there's an issue with the machine before it arrived. Is there a quick start our onboarding guide to show you the basics for initial calibration and setup? Is there a manual online you can use in order to look up a specific issue? How do you get technical support from your reseller or printer manufacturer if there is an issue? Is there a troubleshooting guide you can use to help you identify issues? Grab these details and have them handy. It will save you time when you really need it. Installing and maintaining, of course, the most important part of the setup is this stage. How do we setup and maintain our hardware and materials? The subtopics of the section are unbox equipment, perform initial calibration, fabricate test parts, preventive maintenance and service checks. Unbox equipment, in previous lectures, we have discussed the unboxing moment in the 3D printing community. We've also gone over advice for how and where to setup your machine. But in summary, here are a few of the desktop 3D printer care and feeding tips from earlier reprise as the questions added to your master checklist. Questions, do you have access to the machines original box in case you need service or need to return the machine quickly? Is the machine seated firmly on a sturdy table or shelf? They won't shift our vibrate when printing at top speeds. Are there any issues with sound safety or access? Should you need to run a print 24 hours a day for multiple days? Did you place your machine in the right place or just any place? Do you have access to all the parts of the machine you'll need for typical operation service and maintenance? Is your machine dry, warm and far from the AC ventilation our drafts? Did you and other operators complete the onboarding first print tutorials created by the manufacturer? We're all the initial calibration stages executed successfully. Initial calibration,, many of the initial calibration settings that are required for the operator of your printer should have been either accomplished at the factory are covered in the process of getting started after unboxing the machine. But if you are using a shared machine and miss those initial stages, it is worth it to take a look to see what's involved. What I mean by initial calibration are the baseline settings and values associated with your specific machine that bring that machine in line with itself, and seeing cup expectations of the machine profiles for preparing job files. Many manufacturers make efforts to either pre-calibrated the factory or simplify the process of tuning, setting and validating these elements, because it can have a significant impact on the experience of using machine later. In an industrial context, this process might be mandated as part of the sale. But with desktop equipment, this element is generally left up to you. The exact steps needed for calibration differ not only from model to model, but configuration to configuration. But the critical objective remains the same, regardless. Accomplish each of the adjustments needed to bring your machine in line with what your machine expects. Fabricate test parts. One excellent way to answer the question, how do I confirm that everything is setup correctly is to print a test part. You can print just about anything to get a very basic sense of the machine, but you might want to consider a benchmarking part, such as the little 3D Benji boat or other frequently tested objects. That way, you'll have a wealth of printed examples. You can find online to compare your results. Preventive maintenance, it goes without saying that a significant requirement for a successful printed part at the end of the process is equivalent in good repair, well-tuned and prepped for running the job. When I'm talking about a well-tuned and function machine, I'm not just talking about a tidy machine that doesn't look like it has any obvious issues. You need a well-maintained calibrated machine to produce the part you expect. And though tidiness is a key step, you also need to account for the functional elements they're not immediately visible. Tidy is good, but what is important is under the hood. I'm splitting this discussion into two parts, but they are parts that are highly connected to each other. Maintenance tune like an oil change and calibration tune like an instrument. When I refer to maintenance, I'm focusing on the long-term condition. Well-function and tuning drawing on the auto-tune up reference. When you take a car in for an oil change, the garage is rarely that concerned with how your vehicle looks or how neat the floor is under the back seat. They are only concerned with how well it functions under the hood. Oil levels, water levels, belt steering, wheel alignment, state of the transmission, state of the exhaust muffler. And well, after a tune up, your car visually looks much as you left it if they did a good job. You could really feel a difference on the road with how well the car functions in response. Bringing this back into the realms of 3D printing, your preventive maintenance strategy will involve identifying what elements will over time fail and need to be replaced. The goal of PM is to catch elements before they have failed, so you can make adjustments before more damage happens to your machine and a significant part of this is performing regularly scheduled tuneups. When I talk about calibration, I'm referring to what you need to do for each time that you use the machine thank tuned up like a stringed instrument. You don't expect a guitar or violin to sound just like it did six months ago no matter how safely you have stored it. When you tune it up, you're getting it back to the baseline. Again, it doesn't matter how clean the machine was or how tidy you have kept it when not in use. If you have it tuned and prepared it for playing, there can be invisible issues. You don't expect it to sound the same as last time you used it without taking a moment to retention strings, replace cracked reads and clean away residue. Service checks. While preventive maintenance is intended to be scheduled to anticipate wear and tear, service checks help you catch and repair issues that come up between preventive maintenance milestones. Here are some key considerations for both service checks and preventive maintenance. What preventive maintenance schedule does your manufacturer recommend? What service checks do they recommend outside of that? What parts experience the most wear and tear on your machine? Can you anticipate a failure with a ready-to-install replacement? How do you get replacement parts? What lubrication or grease do you need? Where is it needed and how much is needed? The steps your machine requires you to take before you're ready to print can feel like a little bit of a drag, but it is helpful to take a look at what is needed and why. This we'll both tell you what information your machine knows about itself and its configuration, and allow you to identify ways that you can tune it for tighter operational cycles further down the road. Additionally, the list of things the machine can't know about itself is helpful to know, especially when you're thinking at a high-level about what kinds of projects you want to achieve with the hardware.
