Transcript:
Hey, guys, rob here with 3d printscape today. I’m going to show you how to stop a print midway through to change your filament. Uh, there’s a couple reasons you might want to do this. One is if you’re running low in filament and you want to swap it out when you’re getting towards the end of the spool and two if you want to, uh, change the color or change filament type midway through, so let’s say you are printing a base or something, and in this case, I’ve got a print, Go right now. Words and silver, and then you want to switch to White Midway through. Um, you can do that as well. Now there’s two ways to do it. Um, the first one is going to be just using the controls here on the printer itself, Which I’ll walk you through And then the second one. If you’re trying to change, uh, color midway through is in Cura, so I’ll walk through that process as well. You can have it stop at a specific height. Go ahead and move the nozzle off to the side so that you can change out the filament and then start it back up. That is a good option if you’re looking for a more specific print or a specific layer that you want to swap it on it. If you don’t really care about the layer then just using everything at the printer. Itself is fine, but if you’re really trying to get a more precise, uh, result, and then you’re going to want to use Cura, if you’re trying to change the color, all right, so let’s go and get started. I’m going to zoom in on the printer and show you what we need to do before we do that. Make sure you guys hit that, like button and subscribe. Today we actually just hit 500 subscribers, which is awesome. Thank you for that, all right, guys? I went ahead and zoomed in at the printer. So you can see exactly what I’m doing. Um, in this scenario, I don’t need to actually change the filament, but let’s say you wanted to change this because you’re running low or just wanted to switch over to different color. First thing you need to do is go to your control and go to pause print. Make sure you hit pause, print and not stop print. If you accidentally stop the print, there’s no way to resume it back from the current state. All right, so now when you hit pause print, it’s going to, uh, raise the z-axi’s a tad bit and then move it off to the home position so that you can actually do your filament swap, all right, so then from there, you’ll want to walk through the filament swap process here. Let’s go to prepare now. You really won’t need to preheat the PLA because it’s already up to temperature, but for some reason, your temperature dropped or whatever. Just go ahead and hit preheat PLA and then pre-hi’t the hot end, and then it will go through that process. Then you can go ahead and swap out your filament, which I will do, right, all right, guys? I went ahead and put some white filament in, uh, went ahead and purged it all out, so that, uh, it’s gonna, so we don’t have any of the gray or silver left in the feed. Uh, if you don’t know how to change filament on the indoor threes yet I’ll link to a video. I did on it in the description below, It’s a pretty straightforward process. Um, but it does take a little bit of getting used to all right so now that we have the filament swapped out, lets. Go ahead and resume our print. [APPLAUSE] Just gonna hit resume print and it’s gonna start. It’s gonna do a little purge just to make sure that, uh, everything is primed and then resume which I’ll show you here in a second when it actually starts back up, so go ahead and just hit continue unless you need to purge more. Um, it perched more than enough, actually. Let me get that out of there. Oops, you can see. It left a little ball here. I just want to get that out of the way one thing to make a note of which we should have done a minute ago. Is that when you take when you go ahead and pause the print and the extruder comes off, it could leave a little bit of just filament behind. So make sure you clean that up before you resume the print, all right, and that’s really all there is to it so now we’ll go ahead and jump over to the computer. I will show you how to just define everything in Cura, so if you wanted to stop 10 millimeters up or at layer 50. As an example, it’ll be part of the g-code, it’ll automatically pause the print at that point. Move the extruder head to where you tell it to go and then just wait for you to come change the filament or do whatever you need to do with it. Alright, guys, we’re here. At the computer, I’ve got Cura launched, and I’m going to go ahead and use the baby Yoda model. As an example, all right, for this scenario, I want to print the bottom base here, A dark gray and the rest of the object itself. White, so lets. Go and get started. I’ll show you how first thing we want to do is get the height of this base. Um, so we can, if we don’t know what it is, Which, in this case I don’t, We can just go ahead and do a quick slice. Uh, then go over to preview and then we can actually get the height, so let’s do that real quick, all right, so let’s jump over to preview since that’s done, and we want to get the height of the base itself. Um, all right, so let’s zoom in here. We want to stop at the base here where this is done right before it starts actually building the baby Yoda, part of the figure. So let’s just go ahead and drop this down layer by layer until we get where we want, so you can see here. It looks like that is the topmost layer lets. Go up a little bit. More 61 is still building that bar bottom part of the base. As you saw, it added another layer. Uh, 62 might be okay. 63 is starting to build up the figure itself. So I’m gonna go with 63 So what I’m going to want to do is stop this print at layer 63 so that I can change the filament color. So let me show you how to do that. Cura, actually has this really nice Built-in Plug-in If we go up to extensions post processing and modify gcode. Uh, I’m just remove this back out, so we want to add script and then pause at height. So we’re going to drop this in here and you can actually do this multiple times throughout the print. If you really wanted to, so if you wanted to change the color, a couple times or swap between different filaments or whatever the case may be, you have that option. But in this scenario, I’m only doing it one time, all right, so first thing we want to do is switch this to layer number since we don’t know how tall that base is, We just know what layer to stop it, so we’re going to stop at layer 63 All right, so then let’s go and walk through the rest of these settings. Um, we want to move the print head away from the, uh, object when it’s being paused. Um, if not, it’s gonna potentially continue to. Ooh, some filament out and it couldn’t mess with the print, so I tend to move this at 25 X and 150 Why this has worked for me in the past? If you’re doing a much larger print, you might have to adjust that based on what you’re working with. I also want to retract the filament a little bit, so it takes the pressure off. It just prevents some oozing from happening, so let’s just say a 10 millimeter and the retraction speed is fine. Um, and then we’re going to go down to the extrude amount. This is, uh, really after you swap out the filament before it starts back up again. It’s telling it how much to how much filament to actually purge if you went through the change filament process and had a solid purge already. You can leave this at zero. I tend to just add a little bit here. As a buffer, so let’s just say 25 millimeters. Just in case I didn’t get a complete purge and I want the line to be pure when it goes when it starts back on the print itself, and you can also choose to redo layers if you want. So if you wanted to print the same layer that it was on before again, obviously it will be adding an additional layer to the print. A single layer shouldn’t really offset anything. I’ve never actually done this before if you had a good purge ahead of time and plan everything out, right, you don’t need to worry about this, but if you want to be safe, you can just add a layer. It won’t hurt anything, all right, and then your standby temperature. So, uh, let’s say you don’t know when it’s going to hit layer 63 and you’re going to bed or going shopping or whatever the case may be, and it might be an hour or two where it’s kind of just sitting there waiting. You can keep the temperature up. I’ll typically set this to 50. It just really keeps the heat block warm, and it doesn’t take as long to heat up again when it goes to start. And then if you wanted to, you can add some display, text it to me, it’s pointless, but if you wanted to say something on the console, you can do that as well, but that’s really all there is to it, so if we go ahead and close this and we obviously will have to re-slice to account for that. There you go, that’s. All there is to it. Um, like I said, it’s a great plugin That’s built into Cura. It gives you a lot of great options, especially if you know you have some filament left in the roll, and you want to try to use as much of it as you can, and if you don’t have a run out sensor or anything like that, it’s a great option, or if you’re trying to switch between filament types or colors, it’s also a great option. If you have any questions, go and leave a comment below ill. Try to get back to you as soon as I can. One last thing I wanted to mention here is this Cura part is not specific to any printer. It’ll work with whatever you have pretty much the entire first part of the video where I was showing you how to swap out the filament midway on a print at the actual printer itself is specific to the Indoor 3 or the creality lineup. It’s pretty much the same. Alright, guys that covers the process to change your filament midway through your print, whether it’s to swap out the filament because you’re running low or if you want to switch to a different filament color or type or whatever the case may be. If you have any questions on the process, go and leave a comment below ill. Get back to you soon as I can. And if you haven’t already make sure you hit that, like button and subscribe, It’ll really help our channel grow, thank you.