[cadandcookies]

Whoah boy, 3D printing!

My team/school purchased two Replicator 2 printers last fall. We've been playing around with them since that time and have logged around 200 hours of print time between the two of them.

We've actually had a really solid out of the box experience-- ours came with the new extruder and for the most part produced decent quality prints, until the thermocouple on the second one (affectionately nicknamed "Liquid Snake") became problematic. Printer one ("Solid Snake") has printing for well over 100 hours though amd hasn't encountered many problems at all.

We've exclusively used the default firmware and the MakerWare software package for printing, and our experience has only improved. Our workflow is typically Creo -> Export to .stl -> Makerware -> Printer.

The main things we've found to improve quality are painters tape (buy a 3" roll, we're working with 3M to hopefully get some 6" rolls for FRC teams that would prefer them), leveling the build plate after any failed print, and exporting to .stl at the max resolution possible. The nice thing about how the resolution settings in makerware work is that they're only thickness-- the XY resolution isn't affected. I've gotten nicer parts out of low resolution than high depending on the file I give Makerware.

The other thing is regarding shell and fill settings-- we've found that part strength is significantly more about how many shells than what fill you print at-- we almost never go above 30% fill because returns on print time and strength diminish quickly after that point.

Our next improvement is getting a superflat aluminum build plate, as both of our acrylic plates started warping significantly after about 80 hours of printing. I'll update with that when we get it.

Most of our prints have been parts for our FTC program-- a hanging hook, mount for the Samantha module, a license plate with team numbers, etc, so I can't comment too much on small prunts, other than that the smallest we've gone is 1/2" on a latch and we were very happy with how that part turned out.