I Tried running in 3D printed shoes

NetworkChuck| 00:14:34|Mar 24, 2026
Chapters6
The video introduces 3D printed shoes and experiments with PLA and a softer TPU filament, then recalls the Bamboo Lab H 2D’s capabilities beyond printing as the host teases a five-mile test run.

Ambitious test of 3D-printed shoes and a versatile Bamboo Labs H2D printer, with real-world struggles from fit to function and a dramatic five-mile finish.

Summary

NetworkChuck pulls no punches as he tests the Bamboo Labs H2D, a mega-printer that doubles as a laser engraver and cutter. He starts by showing two 3D-printed shoe concepts: a rigid PLA version and a softer TPU version, then dives into setup, dual-nozzle printing, and the many accessories that come with the device. Chuck details the printer’s impressive specs (3 25 by 3 20 by 3 25 build volume, 1000 mm/s nozzle speed, 350°C hot end, 65°C heated chamber) and explains how the A MS filament system can run multiple materials. The video unfolds like a hands-on workshop: experimenting with TPU via a bypass tube, raising the print height for proper feeding, and drying filaments in the chamber. He also teases laser engraving, cutting modules, and a pen-drawing option, demonstrating logo engraving on wood and a cork board. The payoff arrives with the five-mile run in 3D-printed shoes—full of missteps (size, fit, heat, and blister drama)—yet ultimately a proof of concept for what might be possible with future iterations. Chuck closes by praising the printer’s capabilities while underscoring that this particular shoe experiment isn’t a ready-to-wear product. The takeaway: the tech is awe-inspiring, but the real-world wearables still need more refinement. Sponsorship gratitude to Bamboo Labs punctuates the narrative.

Key Takeaways

  • Bamboo Labs H2D offers a huge build volume (3 25 x 3 20 x 3 25 mm) and fast nozzle speed (up to 1000 mm/s), enabling multi-material prints with dual nozzles.
  • ],
  • target_audience
  • Tech enthusiasts and makers curious about next-gen 3D printing hardware like Bamboo Labs H2D, especially those interested in multi-material printing, laser engraving, and the practical hurdles of turning 3D prints into wearable prototypes.
  • topics
  • ["Bamboo Labs H2D","3D printing","PLA","TPU","PETG","PAHT-CF","dual extrusion","laser engraving","cutting module","3D printed shoes","prototyping"]

Who Is This For?

Essential viewing for makers and hardware enthusiasts curious about turning ambitious 3D-printing experiments into wearable prototypes, and for anyone evaluating the Bamboo Labs ecosystem as a multi-function printer.

Notable Quotes

""This is a 3D printed shoe and I'm going to attempt a five mile run wearing these.""
Chuck introduces the core experiment: running five miles in a 3D-printed shoe.
""The hot end supports a maximum temperature of 350 degrees Celsius... and there's active chamber heating.""
Detailing the printer’s capabilities that enable printing tough materials.
""We dried out the TPU... and after all that, it turns out we printed the shoes in the wrong size.""
Key hurdles: material handling and sizing misstep that derail the run.
""Can I actually run five miles in 3D printed shoes? I don't know. But I was optimistic.""
The moment of truth before the run, capturing the experimental spirit.
""These are not ready for prime time. I can't feel my feet.""
Honest assessment of the footwear after the brutal test.

Questions This Video Answers

  • Can you really run a five-mile race in 3D-printed shoes?
  • What makes Bamboo Labs H2D different from other 3D printers for multi-material prints?
  • How does the TPU bypass modification affect filament feeding in dual-extrusion printers?
  • What roles do the laser engraving and cutting modules play in a printing-focused workflow?
  • Is PAHT-CF filament suitable for automotive parts or just strong prototyping?
Bamboo Labs H2D3D printingPLATPUPETGPAHT-CFlaser engravingcutting moduledual extrusionwearable prototyping
Full Transcript
This is a 3D printed shoe and I'm going to attempt a five mile run wearing these. Yeah, don't do this. Don't ever do this to yourself. But hold on. Did I just say 3D printed shoes? Because this is another 3D printed shoe. This is made with a standard PLA filament, and as you can see, it's rock solid, no bend at all. But this is the shoe I made with TPUA special kind of filament that's softer and bendable. Now let's rewind a bit. Last year, bamboo sent me this new printer, the bamboo H 2D. Now it was new back then. It's not new now, but lemme tell you, this thing is crazy and it does way more than 3D printing, laser engraving, cutting, even forging my signature. Wait, what? So in today's video we're going to look at everything this printer can do and by the end we'll see if I can run those five miles, get you copy. Ready? Let's print. Okay, so let's talk about what's so special about this printer besides the fact that I can print shoes, which is honestly pretty cool, but Bamboo Labs was like, that's not special enough, special or enough. I said it right the first time. Now first it's huge. This is the biggest 3D printer I've ever had. 3 25 by three 20 by 3 25 and notice this is sick. There's options for single nozzle and double nozzle printing. I didn't even know I needed that, but I did. We'll talk more about that later. And the nozzle speed is very fast. 1000 millimeters per is that millimeters, 1000 millimeters a second, which is double my last printer, the bamboo X one carbon, which I bought myself. So I was tickled to death when Bamboo labs sent me this. Did I just say tickle to death? I feel like I'm 85 now. The hot end supports a maximum temperature of 350 degrees Celsius. Yeah, so you can use some high temperature filaments and there's active chamber heating. So the build chamber can be heated to 65 degrees Celsius or 149 degrees Fahrenheit, which is great for drying out certain filaments. We'll also talk more about that later. And I mean if I just scroll through their specs, there's a ton, but you know what? I'm not really a 3D printing YouTuber. That's not my thing. I care more about what can I do? If you want to nerd out on anything else, go see the 3D printing nerd for me. I'm just like, let's do something. So I started my 3D printing journey on this thing. I kind of hated it. The reality enter three, and this thing was fine. I built it. It took forever. It also took forever to print. And honestly it did its job to get me hooked to the idea of 3D printing, but I'm like, there's got to be a better way to do this. And I was right. There's something better. I was googling, what's the apple of 3D printers? Bamboo labs came up and I bought this bad boy, the Bamboo Lab X one carbon game changer. And then I got this bamboo lab printer and this bamboo lab printer. Well, they sent me these, I haven't even opened this one yet, but look at this. Compared to all these printers, this is the Bamboo Labs, H 2D. Again, it's huge, but what do we need all that space for? And also when they sent me this, they sent me a ton of other things. This is all stuff they just sent me. I'm going to have to figure this stuff out. This gave me some breaking bad vibes. What am I building here? Now? I'm not going to lie. All this stuff, I'm like kind of overwhelmed, but also I have to play with it right now. The first we had to set it up, bamboo provided a quick start guide that made it pretty easy for my team to set it up. And yeah, I made my team do it. I have a team. And if you've never used a Bamboo Lab printer before, here's how it works. This at the top is the a MS. This is what holds all your filament and whichever filament you want to use, the a MS will send it through the single tube out the back and into the printer. This tube goes all the way into the extruder, which is actually what extrudes the filament while you're printing. Now this model has a feature where instead of only having one extruder, you have two and you can see there's two tubes going into it. And this means you can print multi-material prints much faster than ever before. And you can see there's a little latch that moves back and forth blocking, whichever nozzle is not in use. But there's a problem. Remember how the a MS only has one tube coming out the back? Well, as you can see, this one tube goes right into the slot for the right extruder. But what about the left? For the left extruder, you can actually attach a single spool to the side of the printer and feed it right in. And this allows you to do multi-material prints. Alright, cool. Now what filament should we try first? Well, we have a lot to pick from. They sent me all this filament. I won't do a deep dive, but PLA is the most common. This hacker mask is made of PLA. It's actually glow in the dark PLA and then there's PETG. They gave us tons of different kinds of those. This one's translucent, PETG, pet G, I'm going to call it PET G. You can see through it. That's crazy. And one of their newer filaments is called PAHT dash cf. This one is super strong filament. You can use it to print parts for your car. That's how strong it's, although I'm not sure I want to trust that with a car. I don't know, maybe it's good. We didn't test that though, but we did use it to print these Sony camera covers, which we still use. So we have a lot to choose from. But since there are two nozzles, we can do both nozzles at one time. For example, we use orange, PETG and denim PETG to create crash bandicoot. But so far we've just been talking about printing. It can do more than printing. By the way, bamboo Labs sent me this printer. They are sponsoring this video and I tricked them into thinking that I'm a 3D printing influencer. I'm not. But anyways, thank you. Bamboo Labs. Let's talk about lasers. This is one of the biggest, and honestly for me, most unexpected feature on the H 2D laser engraving and cutting. So they gave us two modules, a 10 watt version and a 40 watt version. The 40 watt version is a little more powerful, but they can do both cut and engrave. Let's start with engraving. When I first got this printer, it was also when I had just gotten my new pug mochi. So of course I wanted to make a mochi dog tag and it can just do that. That's really cool. Now first you have to know lasers are dangerous. If you ever play with the laser pointer in class, you know that the teacher would yell at you. If you shine in someone's eyes, it'll go blind. This is more powerful than that. That's why you shouldn't look at them. That's why the side of the glass of the H 2D is green. So you can actually watch the lasers. This is the only time you can actually look at a laser and it will automatically stop if you open the door safety. But there's another problem and it's why we have this breaking bad scenario. Laser engraving creates a lot of smoke. So they gave us a ventilator, which was pretty intimidating. I dunno why I started coughing when I said ventilate. That was weird. This thing connects to the back of the printer and it filters out all the smoke so you don't have to breathe any of it in. It's a nice touch. Thank you, bamboo. And also they gave us this little kill switch button, which I kind of want to attach to everything now like ai. AI should come with that button. Anyways, you can install this little kill switch and anytime you want to force the printer to turn off, you just hit the button and if you want to turn back on, just give it a little twist. Now let's engrave something. We'll do the dog tag, but I want to build up to that. Let's do something easier. They also sent me a plank of wood, which is just so weird. I love it though. They sent us a lot of different materials. So we'll set this down on the printer, right on top of this little special laser engraving platform. And then you can take off the front cover above the print head and then slide, attach the laser module right onto it, lock it into place and plug it in. And now we can just use the software. I'm going to have it engrave the network chuck logo into wood, which is something I didn't really care about doing until now. Start and it starts engraving and look at that like it did it into laser engrave network. Chuck, plank of wood. How much wood could a network Chuck? Chuck? Yeah, I hate that. And then we did the dog tag. Look at that mochi. This is mochi by the way, if you've never met him. Now let's get to cutting. Now you can use the laser module for cutting, which lasers for cutting. That sounds fun. But they also gave us another tool that makes cutting a bit easier. It's the cutting module. This is very similar to install like the laser module. You just remove the front panel and slide the sucker in. But since it doesn't use lasers, you won't have to deal with smoke or the air tube, so you can take that off. It does have its own cutting platform, which is a little sticky. So the material stays in place and now we can cut all sorts of things. They gave us vinyl, so we had to do that. We cut the network check logo out and stuck it to this workbench. We cut the line's tech tips logo and stuck it to our trash can. And you can even cut leather to build your own wallet. But the other crazy thing about this cutting module is that it has a pen attachment. We can hand our printer a pen and they can draw for us, which honestly feels weird. It's like you can use a printer to print things or you can use your 3D printer to draw things. And then we had to autograph a bag of coffee, which was a really roundabout way of me trying to get an autograph bag of coffee to one of my fans. I'm like, we can just do that. That'd be fun. But now let's get back to the shoes here and we're going to talk about TPU. This is a special kind of filament that's softer than regular filament. Like this right here is a regular PLA 3D printed cube, and this is a TPU printed cube. See how squishy it is now compared to PLA, which is like raw spaghetti, TPU is like cooked spaghetti. It's soft. And because of that you can't load TPU through the regular A MS. It has to be done manually. So we disconnected the PTFE tube that goes from the right extruder to the four filament A MS, and instead fed the TPU through the bypass slot and the single A MS. Then we fed the TPU through the axis port at the back of the printer. This allows TPU to be fed directly to the extruder. Now when we first tried this, the TPU bubbled and came out raw. So we had to go into research mode and we realized our nozzle was set too hot. We were practically boiling the filament, so we lowered it to 215 degrees Celsius. That stopped the bubbling, but we were still getting some issues. So remember how I said the TPU is like soft cooked spaghetti? Well, it turns out just using that bypass port wasn't enough. Instead, we had to put the printer on the floor so that the TPU could be high up and go straight into the extruder. This took a minute to figure out. Thankfully I have a team that spent a lot of time doing it while I just sat in here and sip coffee. And that was it. My team started the print night and everything looked really good. But then over the weekend I came by to check on it. The print had failed. This was super frustrating because it takes so long and then it just fails After more research. It turns out we just skipped something in the documentation. It was our fault kind of situation. Don't skip reading the instructions, the documentation. You have to read that. My team learned the hard way. Now remember how I told you the printer has a setting that lets you heat it to 65 degrees Celsius to dry out special filaments? Well, the TPU turns out to be one of those filaments that needs that. So we dried out the TPU tried it again and it worked perfectly. Documentation. And after all that, it turns out we printed the shoes in the wrong size. Yeah, this really sucked. But to fix it, we simply cut out some soles of the cork material and that made it feel fine. No it didn't. I had to wear them. I can't fill my feet. Now it's time for the run. Can I actually run five miles in 3D printed shoes? I don't know. But I was optimistic. I'm like, this is new technology. Sure, it's going to work. First time, the shoes didn't quite fit right. The sole was cork and it was the middle of Texas summer, so it was really, really hot. That looked good and it's ready. The first few miles were fine. No, they weren't. They suck. It all sucked. By the end of the run, I was completely dead. My feet were absolutely killing me, but it got suckier as time went behind. So it was less sucky in the beginning and the suck factor went up. I honestly didn't know if I could finish this run. I crossed that finish line. I did it. Yeah, don't do this. Don't ever do this to yourself. These are not ready for prime time. I can't feel my feet. But on the bright side, I think the shoes held up like, oh, so they did not protect my feet, but they protected themselves. I haven't felt them since mile three. Do you need us to carry you home? Yeah. Immediately when I started running, I got a rock caught up in here and I'm like, what the heck is going on? So I had to stop and fish the rock out. So these are way too wide, but I probably can't run for two weeks now because of my blisters and my knees are probably jacked up now. And I did it. Take that Mr. Beast. I'm not going to lie. This run sucked. It was the worst. I paid for this for a long time, but I finished and I took those shoes off as fast as I could. Now to their credit, look at the shoes. They actually did not come apart. They survived. And I have to wonder if they were the right size, these were too big. And if we'd actually put a real sole in there, one that wasn't made out of cork, maybe the experience would've been better. So running shoes, probably not going to be printing those anytime soon. But regular shoes, I would wear these around. And what this really is, is more of just a POC, a proof of concept for what we can start doing with 3D printers. If we can print shoes that some weird bearded guy who drinks a lot of coffee can run five miles in. What else can we do? Can we print prosthetics? I think the applications and medical technology could be very fascinating. Anyways, my feet hurt for a long time, even two weeks after. I was still like, ow. But it was fun. And now we have this amazing printer that can print. It's got lasers, it can cut stuff. This printer can do anything. And this is not a comprehensive review. It's more like a, I think technology is awesome and this printer is kind of a marvel for what it can do. It can do anything most things. Anyways, thank you to Baby Labs for sponsoring this video and for giving me a 3D printer and letting me mess around with it. If you're looking to get into 3D printing, you should look at Bamboo Labs. They made me fall in love with it and I think it'll have the same effect for you. Anyways, that's all I got. I'll catch you guys next time. Hey, you're still here. If you're new here, I've started to pray for you, my audience at the end of my video. And yes, I said pray. I know it was kind of weird, but I do believe in the power of prayer and I genuinely love you guys, my audience, and I want to see you have amazing careers, fulfilling lives, and I want to pray for that. So I know it's weird. Let's just go with it. 1, 2, 3, pray. God, I just thank you for the person on the other side of the screen, a member of my audience. I just thank you that they are here. I celebrate them. God, I just thank you that you created them and that they are awesome. Thank you that they are interested in technology and I ask that this fire in them, this interest would just grow. I ask, and you name that as they walk away from this video, that they would turn this energy they have into something cool, productive. Let them do something amazing with it. Bless their careers right now, wherever they're at in their career, whether they're in high school or college, and they're just now trying to figure out what it is God give them clarity. Or if they're in the middle of their career and they're just trying to figure out, okay, how do I advance? Or how do I figure out what's next? Or how do I keep up? Give them clarity. God bless them. Bless their families. Let their families be strong. Let them have rich time with their families. When they do get a chance to get away from the computer screen. Bless them now. I pray for their careers. Just bless them to you, Lord. I ask this in your name, Jesus. Amen. Alright, I'll catch you guys next time.

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