My Kids Started a Business in my Basement

Boy, my mechanical room is a mess. I've never been more proud. A year ago, I bought my kids a 3D printer for Christmas, and it was one of my most devious parenting maneuvers yet. See, they thought I was giving them the means to make toys and fidget gadgets. But what I was actually giving them was some motivation to learn a little bit about 3D printing and 3D modeling, which I hoped would serve as a catalyst to getting them a little bit more curious about the technology around them and how it actually works. But it has gone so far beyond that. I've been selling 3D printed fidgets to classmates. I went to the entrepreneur fair last week at school and made 200 bucks, which puts my total at 500. Now, even the teachers are apparently getting in on the action. Uh, these are apparently super popular with the adults. This is your number one seller right now, right? Easily number one seller. Naturally, when I learned that the storm that hit our mechanical room was an entrepreneurial hurricane, the first thing I did was bring home some idle 3D printers and the Prussa Core 1 that Joseph, I call him Joseph. Hm. Have we actually met [laughter] sent over for evaluation? Unfortunately, the second thing I didn't do is organize our newly planted print farm. And we have learned extremely quickly that scaling up takes more than just printers. We have got to fix this. And there's no time to lose because next week is round two of the entrepreneur fair. And Randy here sold almost all of the inventory that he prepared for the first one. Just like Colton's team sold this segue to our sponsor, Meta PCs. Check out this beauty of a custom printed chassis. It's MetaPC's Night Reaper pre-build, which comes fully equipped with an AMD 9800X 3D, one of the best gaming CPUs on the market, as well as an RTX 5080, making it an absolute powerhouse. Pick up one today and use code LTT to save a few bucks. Dad, we're out of red filament again. Okay, we can talk about filament later because first there are a lot of things to address here. Some of them are obvious at the surface like the total lack of organization of our workspace, but some of them are a little deeper, like the destroyed print head on our OG machine, this bamboo P1S. That wasn't my fault. That was my sister's. Well, let's start by fixing that. As something of a 3D printing novice, hotends are something I don't really know a ton about, and it's a surprisingly deep topic. We might need a bit of help. You laid out your requirements, and I chose BQ's Panda Revo hotend with a mix of brass and obsidian nozzles, and in a variety of nozzle sizes. These are going to help you change your nozzles really fast, and Obsidian is great for abrasive materials. Your Core 1 doesn't really need this because it's got a pretty good system already. You just kind of loosen two screws. This sounds amazing. Just one question. Who the heck are you? Oh, I'm I'm Sean. I uh I worked for a couple 3D printer manufacturers. My last job was as an editor at a 3D printing publication, and I work here now. You you know me. You drilled me on Star Wars a couple days ago. Cool. This has been out of commission for almost 2 weeks. What did you guys do to it? Like you got a whole bunch of filament on it, and then when you were trying to remove it with a torch, you like killed it. Yeah, somehow. We melted the temperature probe by accident. Okay, let's go ahead and throw the new one on. Theoretically, this is as simple as just [snorts] propping it on there and then we're good to Oh, wow. Is it really that easy? Wait, are you sure you don't want to put the fan on first? Yeah, we should probably do that. Okay. And we should probably call out the precision screwdriver from ltdstore.com. Great for these types of jobs. I don't know how he managed to drop the screw cuz it's magnetic, but like father like son, I guess. Also, we've got new sizes now. So, we got the obsidians in 4 and 6. And we got a brass nozzle not just in4, but also 0.25. So, if you wanted to print finer stuff on this one, then you could. It'll take longer, but if people are willing to pay a little bit more for a finer print, then hey, who cares? Yeah, exactly. Can I see? Yep. Just needs man strength. Or rather, just needs being willing to force things a little bit. It's good. I don't want to break the new nozzle. Yeah, I don't want to break the new nozzle either. These are way more expensive than our old ones. The obsidians are like twice the price of a brass nozzle. How much are they? Around $75. 75 bucks per nozzle. Pretty. Wow. So, the deal we have with him and the girls for that matter is we have no problem encouraging their entrepreneurship. We're willing to provide the equipment, but consumables they need to reimburse us for. And I haven't figured out where hotends figure into this. I'm on the side of equipment. Yeah, you would be. Oh, now's a good time to mention that we got some new desicant that you can put in your AMS. Finally got better desicants. These are the silica gel desicant packs from Wiser Dry and they are rechargeable, which means that they'll change color when they're too wet and then you can put them in a microwave, a stove, or just your filament dryer to recharge them and put them back in. That's great. I hate lowquality desicants. Uh, you're going to want to take these out and you're going to want to open that and take out the desicant that's already in there. Great. And that's probably old. It feels moist. Yeah. Oh, wild. This is way more than I need. Yes. But it's great that you can put these packs in your vacuum sealed bags. And that's going to help keep the filament dry while you're storing it. What the Sam heck happened here? You left it loaded with red, but you took the red spool out. Yeah, cuz I needed the red. I noticed, by the way, that you only comp me for the weight of your finished prints. What happens to all this? I don't know. Want to go ahead and fire up a test print? Sure. Just don't forget we have a 6 mm nozzle in there. Now, other than that, the Obsidians, Obsidians, however you pronounce them, they're drop in replacements. There's not going to be a preset for Obsidian nozzles. I would stick with E3D's high flow profiles. The thing to keep in mind is when you're using a bigger nozzle, you may need more heat to make sure that it gets through the entire thing, but there's a pretty good uh melt zone on these nozzles. So, you should be fine for 6. Now, let's go ahead and print a benchie. Uh oh. After calibrating 26 minutes. You know what? That's a perfect time for us to do something about the state of this room. Oh, you thought it was just all fun and games upgrading your 3D printers today? See, making space for the Prussa Core 1, that was no biggie. I just shoved this guy over and then plonked it on there. But when logistics offered up these three bamboo X1C's that we retired from our print farm at the office in favor of more Prussas, there was no plan. Okay. Wait, why am I doing this? Kids, guess who got a special assignment? Me. Both of you. You're both right. Time to clean this place up. I want all the garbage dealt with. And anything that isn't garbage, I would like organized in a nice tidy little pile. Why don't we put it in this toolbox that Randy made? Okay. Okay. Chop chop. While the kids are working on that, Sean and I have a few things to deal with, too. We've got to build this shelf. And I've got to get all of my camping stuff out of this storage room. And then slide it down. If you're going to take the printers out, then what are you going to put in here? Um, I'm going to put a big battery that keeps our house powered in power outages. Oh, our test print failed. Doesn't know what filament to use. Oh, you know what? Honestly, that's probably fine. Why don't we just move this out first and then we'll do the test print out there. Oh, this is cool. Thanks to the power of our magnetic cable management, it's just one cord. See? Using our power bar holders like that. Using our arches like that. Good stuff. Good stuff. ltstore.com. All right, let's go, boy. Oh, hold on. We're not clearing the door. We're like a BC trucker. Little bit of local humor for you. This space is not as big as I thought. Well, you're going to use the space. What do you think we should do? Have two just two racks. One here, one there, or whatever. We'll make our best effort to line up all the printers on this rack. And then along this wall right here and then this shelf, I want you to organize all the filament tools, desicant, consumables as best you can. Now, before we put any printers onto here, there is something that I wanted to do first, and that is put some of this MDF on here. All right, shelves are in place. It's time to find out if we can get all three of the X1C's on here. I kind of doubt it. They're each 15 1/2 in and the shelf is like 46. So, it might be hanging off, but it's okay. No. How do you want to handle the AMS's? Would you rather have one printer that can do many colors or more printers that can do a handful of colors? More printers that can do a handful. A man, I was afraid you were going to say that. Now, let's just make sure they all fit on the shelf. And a one and a two. We're not going to get a third on there, but we Not with that attitude. Oh, did we talk about fumes at all? No, we're not yet. Oh, okay. Do you want to do that? Well, we took this out of your mechanical room, which is a separate environment from the rest of your house, right? Yes. Okay. And in here, you're not. So, we're going to want to put an air purifier in there. It's not a perfect solution. You shouldn't use engineering grade materials or ABS, things that have styrene in them. PLA, PETG, they're generally considered to be safer. Okay. And shout out HouseFresh, who we collaborated with a little while ago. I'm gonna go to them and I'm gonna find an air purifier. See called definitely going to fit. You know what? You're right. That's a good call. They are [laughter] like practically touching each other. Look at this edge. It's like just hanging over it. It's perfect. Uh let's move the AMS's down to the bottom. One of the major challenges for me organizing the space was that it has to be children accessible. And he's pretty big now, but she's not. So, we can't have her changing spools up here. Hey, that could work. Now everything reaches. It's much more organized than before. Actually, that's that this is way better. So then Oh, dude. No. No. Hold on. What? What was I thinking before? What was I thinking before? bud. Hello. A boom. Oh, yeah. That right there. That's the 3D printing space [music] money shot. I'm going to start the test print again. Go for it. Something I noticed. You've been printing with your doors closed, Okay. Okay, with the Bamboo Lab machines, Bamboo Lab recommends that you have the door open and also the top if you're doing best practices, but I would at least prop the door open when you're printing with PLA. Otherwise, it might get too hot inside for that kind of material and you won't get the best prints you can. Okay, now is a good time to talk about one of the other challenges that we've had lately, too. Even on the Core 1, which has been our most reliable for bed adhesion, we've had some pretty spectacular print failures. Now, print beds are a consumable, but that doesn't mean that the ones that we have are bad or broken or anything. They should last a very long time. So, to avoid this in the future, couple things. Make sure you've calibrated your printer recently. These bamboos level themselves with pressure sensors in the bed. Next, we need to make sure we're cleaning properly in between prints. Remember how I told you that you could clean them with isopropyl alcohol? Okay. Turns out that for the textured beds, that's actually not correct. Okay. Instead, we want to use a mild detergent and water because that'll help us really get into the grooves and make sure that we get any oils or any contaminants off them. For smooth beds, we just got a bamboo smooth plate. So, you can try this out if you want a different texture on the bottom of your prints or if you're having adhesion issues. Isopropyl, totally fine, but you never want to use it for these. These are super tac cool plates. These are super cool and tack. [clears throat] The point is, neither Frey nor I have tried them before. But in theory, they actually allow you to print cooler, which can save you heating time and cooling time, which is pretty key because another thing that I don't think you knew is that pulling parts off of a hot bed can actually cause the part to warp. So, we don't want to do that. So, now we've got a bunch of extra plates. So, what you can do is you can do your print, pull your plate off, print and all, throw a clean plate on, and start your next print and wait for it to cool down. I didn't know you had to let it cool down. I've been taking it off hot in the past. Me neither. But hey, I mean, what? We're new to this. This is how we learn. There are other ways you can improve bed adhesion. You can try running 5 to 10° hotter for your first layers. Uh or you could try making sure your auxiliary fan is off. Uh finally, there's good oldfashioned glue. Yeah, regular PVP glue acts as a bonding agent for first layers. Uh, you can use like regular Elmer's glue you get from any store, but I like the 3D printing specialized liquid stuff because it makes consistent application easy. Glue also makes it easier to take your prints off of a build plate because though it's an extra bonding layer, it's also a separate layer from that stiffer surface of the print bed. It won't stop severe warping, but it will help those tricky small first layers and tiny features. Plus, with glue, you don't need to clean after every print. I would say clean and reapply every 10 prints or so, or just see how a new application works if you're having trouble. Perfect. Now, it's time to talk about something that bothers me a lot more than it bothers my kids. These multifilament AMS systems. They're super cool for multiolor printing, but they waste so much filament. The last time that I tested X1C printing with an AMS on its default settings, I printed 125 g model with three different filaments and it wasted over 500 g between the tower and the purge. Yeah. Now, fortunately, this is tunable. The first thing we need to do is turn on long retraction. This reduces the amount of the previous filament that gets left in the hotend during a change. This is as simple as ticking this checkbox after enabling developer mode in the preferences. But wait, there's more. Teaching tech has a really good guide on reducing purge. We're going to have that link down below. But in a nutshell, we're going to be enabling purge into infill, which is exactly what it sounds like. And we're also going to be reducing our flushing multiplier. This is the big one. See, you might care about the absolute purity of your colors. [music] I don't. I'd be fine with, you know, redish. So, what we're going to do is instead of purging this much flipping filament every time we change a color, we're going to set it to.5. That'll cut our waist more or less in half. [music] Uh, so you're going to remember how to do all that stuff, right? Uh, yeah. Okay, cool. Because if you minimize your waist, you minimize how much you pay me for filming. With that out of the way, I think we're pretty well optimized. The mechanical room is clean and this is a way more comfortable workspace, especially if you need access to all the printers. To be clear, there is a lot more that we could do in the future. I could maybe move my badments and stuff and we could have like a queuing system for filament that's pending drying. We could maybe get some containers instead of using those inconvenient vacuum bags. And automating print removal. That would be incredible. Do you know you can do that? I didn't know that you can automatically have the print get pulled off the bed and then you can have it start another one for like mass production. Super cool. There's various options for that. Uh autofarmm 3D is an effective one but is a subscription service. OctoPrint's continuous printing plugin is a great alternative. Doesn't work with Bamboo Lab, which is part of the reason that we uh stopped using these at the office. Once you figure out like which hotends you like, we could potentially explore getting some different hotends for the carbons as well. So like higher flow or hardened nozzles to enable more materials, all that kind of stuff. That's cool. Yeah. Don't sound too grateful. Just like I'm not going to sound too grateful to our sponsor, Meta PCs. We showed you their sick night reaper earlier, but we never said who the heck these guys are and why you should trust them to build your PC. Well, they've been in the game since 2020 and have decades of experience under their belt. They don't just build ready to ship rigs. Their emphasis is on quality, consistency, and ease of use. Every unit gets stress tested before being shipped out and comes with their lifetime service and support warranty. and they'll have a PC for your needs, whether that's for gaming or if you need a workstation with multiple pre-built options alongside the option to build your own and even have a sick custom print for the case. So, pick up your very own Night Reaper pre-built and save a few bucks with code LTT or browse everything else MetaPCs has to offer using our link down below. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the one where I showed off my 3D printing setup. Mine kind of sucked, but we collaborated with some other really incredible creators who showed off their setups that are a lot