Extruder - This is a part of a 3D printer. This is the part that heats up to nearly melt the material so that the material can be worked with. A motor pushes the material through the hot part and out of a nozzle at the end.

Filament - This is the material that is extruded. In the case of buildIT, we use a Polylactic Acid (PLA) plastic filament. For more information, please see the post about materials.

Print Bed/Build Plate - This is a part of a 3D printer. This is the part of the printer that the filament is extruded onto. On some of our printers, this is a heated plate with or without glass on top. On others, it is simply a glass plate.

Painters Tape - This may not seem like it, but this is an important part of 3D printing in buildIT. This material is the exact same as the one you would purchase for painting a room in your house. The tape is placed on the print bed so that the material has a rough surface to adhere to. If the tape wasn't there, the material would have a much harder time staying in place.

Layer Height - This is the amount the extruder moves vertically between each layer of the print. This number is usually a fraction of a millimeter for our printers. For more information, please see the post about resolution and layer height.

Warping - This is something that can happen to a print. In some prints, the edges of the part will curl up, away from the build plate. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including the part being too big or too thin. Usually, a part will need to be reprinted if the warping is severe enough.

A raft is an extrusion at the beginning of a print to help a part better adhere to the build plate. Prints that fail due to warping or detachment usually require reprints with rafts.

A raft is some extra plastic that a 3D printer lays down before starting the actual part. The printer lays down about 3 layers in a very simplistic pattern on the build plate. The reasoning is very simple - even with the painters tape, plastic sticks best to other plastic. The idea behind a raft is to give the plastic something solid to attach to before creating the part. The layer height between the raft and the bottom layer of the part is larger than the rest of the layer heights. The idea is to make the raft easy to remove from the part when the part is done.

In the simplest terms, a raft is temporary, extra plastic that the printer lays down before starting the actual part to help the part adhere to the build plate. It is meant to be removed immediately after the print finishes.

Once you gain some familiarity with the printer you're using and you've printed a few things, you'll start getting a sense on whether a part needs a raft before you try printing it. I'll discuss certain types of objects that usually need rafts below. Until you get an intuitive feel about rafts, though, there's an easy process to follow to figure out if you need a raft.

1. Try printing the object on the build plate without a raft. Consider adding glue if you have any doubts!

2. If the object doesn't stick to the build plate, becomes detached after a few layers, or starts warping, cancel the print immediately.

3. Assess why the print didn't go as planned. Did the printer have trouble extruding? Did you not use glue? Is there some mechanical problem that might have caused a failure?

4. If you've determined that there was no failure other than a lack of raft, add a raft and reprint!

There are some prints that almost always require a raft in order to succeed. As stated above, getting a good sense of what needs a raft and what doesn't only truly comes from experience.

A raft is typically needed if:
• the object is smaller than about 10 mm in any direction at the base
• the object is thinner than about 3 layers at the extremities
• the object is larger than about 80 mm in any direction at the base

Essentially, a raft is needed if a part is too big, too small, or too thin.

For Fused Deposition Modeling, or FDM, printers like the ones in build IT, one variable that affects the final quality of a 3D print is the layer height. Typical layer heights are between 0.1 millimeters and 0.5 millimeters. The surface quality of the finished part is proportional to how small the layer height is; smaller layer heights result in smother surface finishes.

For FDM printers, the number of layers is one indicator of how much time a 3D print will take. Choosing a smaller layer height will divide a 3D model into more layers, increasing the print time. For example, an object printed at 0.4mm layer height would take half as much time as an object printed at 0.2mm layer height, because there are half as many layers. Due to machine limitations, the minimum layer height for all prints done in build IT is 0.2mm.