I mentioned before the Cardinal 3D printing sin walking away from machine the second you have printed your part. I'm certainly often guilty of this myself. I think it is something of a natural instinct until you train yourself out of it. You have your part now you have to run off and immediately do something with your part few of us apprentice our way to becoming master printers and Fine Arts Press. You would be kicked out of the building for not resetting a press or tool at the end of each stage of your project. If you are in a shared printer environment where there may be people waiting in the wings to queue up for their part next, don't treat the machine like it has ceased to exist just because you have the part you need. Take a moment to reset the machine for the next use or user. This final step should be part of the fabricate stage even if you have to force yourself to commit to this habit like daily flossing. The good news is that in most cases, you can even take care of this without losing time instead of being forced to wait for a printed part to cool or an SLA part to cure or SLS part to be cleaned in the media blaster. Whatever the context of printing technology, you could be taking some extra steps to make the world a better more organized place. So how do you complete the printing process and perform a machine reset to prepare for the next job? Let me walk you through it. So the final few layers of printing and the end G-code sequence begins which for an ultimate cure means that long z-axis move. It quickens my heart, even from several rooms away. You race to the machine ready to collect your print and reaching in but wait, don't just grab it and go. It will take some real strength of will to fight the temptation ripped apart off the platform and raise to the next stage of the parts life, but remember these three things. You'll never know more about the set up and configuration of the machine, then you know right now. It is far better to let the plate cool and extract this part from the surface outside of the machine, then to struggle with the angle of access and obstacles within the machine. And finally, rather than staring at the part while it cools, you could be resetting the machine for the next job or upsetting it to the default state for a future job by unloading special nozzles, materials and pleading adhesion agents. Getting in the habit of resetting the machine between each duty cycle as needed isn't just a kindness. It can eliminate more than 50% of the failed prints and cut down on the set up time to you or another colleague in a job with the time margin too short to otherwise succeed post-print checklist. A post-print checklist is typically machine-specific. I include the sheet that I use in the resources for this course. Here it is. The key elements are these remove plate set on another surface to cool. Replace plate touch up the adhesion strategy. I prefer glue and it's better to put glue on a cold plate than a plate when it's warm. If I'm done printing, I return the printer to its default state, 0.4-millimeter nozzles or cores. I remove the materials and stow them away in a sealed bin. If I'm not done printing or the next user is continuing with the same materials, I check to see that there is enough material for the next job. If there isn't, there's just a little teeny bit of a coil. I remove the spool and put it in the short ends bin. I'd hate for them not to check and run out of material, then I clean the machine removing any gunk or debris. And finally, if I'm using an Utimaker 2 and don't know the exact thickness of the glass plates, I run the leveling script. When I do these steps efficiently, I'm done before my plate cools. They're not going to remove the part and drop the plate in the in for the use for next job. Why machinery set policies help? So what am I looking for in the machine during the post-print check? I'm looking to make sure that anyone walking up to the printer won't have questions about the state of the machine or what they need to do to run their part. I've observed that many grab-and-go operators not only never returned to the machine to complete the reset process, but they're expedient approaches can often knock a printer out of calibration or even damage it without signaling the next operator to custom configurations, high-tech materials or nozzle swaps. These tiny tasks, by the way, can best be taken care of by you and only you. You're the expert on where the machine has just been and you're the expert in getting it ready for where it needs to go next. Don't worry, I'm not your parent. I don't care if your room is messy or if you wait longer than you should to clean the dishes, but developing some positive habits in this area will have a great impact on the long-term health of your machine.
