One of the cornerstones of our project is to use the cheapest and most commonly available printers in the market. That way we know that what we are creating can be printed and enjoyed by anyone!
For this reason, we are using 2 different printers in the studio: An Anet A6 and a Creality Ender 3.
Anet A6
This whole thing started with an Anet A6 as a test printer. Many hours of testing gave me a better on how to improve the design of the prototypes. It takes a lot of maintenance, and some timing problems arose, but we are still using it for our big prints.
Our Anet A6 has a few upgrades like a glass bed as well as tensors for the Y and X axis. We print with 0.4 nozzles and a 0.2 layer height.
Ender 3
Ender 3 is nowadays one of the best selling 3D printers. You can easily find it for less than 175$/150€! We have 2 in the studio, normally using 0.4 nozzles, the most common and reliable of its kind. For really small Fx, it’s recommended to use a 0.2 nozzle, but we first tested all the 0.4. We mainly print with a 0.12 layer height and a speed up to 90mm/s.
We’ve created several updates for the printers, and we’ve calibrated the e-steps, bed, etc.. Here are a few amazing videos that I use to improve the quality of my prints and could help you a lot:
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We print using Polylactic acid or polylactide (PLA) as our printing filament, which is a biodegradable and bioactive thermoplastic aliphatic polyester derived from renewable resources, such as corn starch (in the United States and Canada), cassava roots, chips or starch (mostly in Asia), or sugarcane (in the rest of the world). In 2010, PLA had the second highest consumption volume of any bioplastic of the world. (“Wikipedia”). We’ll get into more detail about all the filamment we tested in the future, so stay tuned! We always try to use the cheapest, more environmentally friendly materials possible.
With regards to software, we mainly use Cura as our 3D slicer program.
All the printers are on top of a foam layer to experience the less amount of vibration possible.
We hope you’ve learned a little bit more about our printers and hope the info helps you with your printing needs.
Happy gaming and printing!