My journey into 3D printing — where it started, where it's gone, and what I'd tell myself at the beginning

How it started — the Ender 3 era

I started my journey into 3D printing during the COVID lockdowns. My first printer was the Creality Ender 3 V2, which for its time was a great machine. Fairly soon I was doing upgrades — better bed levelling springs, and much later a BL Touch and custom firmware to automate the process.

It was also an education. The Ender 3 is almost a precision mechanical instrument. When everything is aligned and in order, it does exactly what it should. When something is slightly off, you spend your time chasing your tail. There was a lot to learn just dealing with the printer itself, and that was before I'd even started thinking about slicers or design software.

What I was actually making

I discovered Thingiverse early on and started printing things. Very soon I was 3D printing a guitar — which I still have, and was entirely playable when I first built it. I found TinkerCAD and started modifying other people's designs: raising the height of a coffee pod holder (which I still use daily) is an early example that sticks in my mind. Before long I was printing custom fan covers, brackets, holders, and all manner of things that served a real purpose.

That remote control with the missing back? Print a new one.

Almost everything that came off the printer had a purpose. I was either printing a prototype to test whether something would fit or function the way I needed, or printing the finished product directly.

The filament wars

I moved fairly quickly from PLA to ABS — I needed something stronger. ABS doesn't behave well in open printers; it really needs an enclosure. Living in southern Victoria, it's not exactly warm for a fair chunk of the year, and the cold from the window, the warmth from the heater vent, and the draught from the hallway every time someone opened a door all played havoc with prints. I found myself with a tent-style enclosure fairly quickly.

Adhesion was an endless struggle — one frequently won only with cans of hairspray, glue sticks, and a lot of scrubbing glass plates. Something as simple as changing filament was a mission. As the extruder wore, there were endless clogs and prints that required significant effort to produce reliably.

The upgrade: Ender 3 V3 KE

Eventually the Creality Ender 3 V3 KE was released — a much more modern machine capable of significantly faster print speeds. It had a larger bed and a PEI plate, which meant less fighting with adhesion. It was direct drive, so filament no longer needed to be manually fed through extruders and tubes. It integrated with the Nebula camera so I could monitor prints remotely.

A solid upgrade. The caveat was that the only filaments I could reliably get to behave at speed were Creality's own Hyper series — particularly their ABS. Same as the previous printer, most of its life was spent printing things I actually needed, usually after prototyping them first. That 30mm spacer between a post and downpipe? No problem.

Moving to the garage — and a very old rack cabinet

A couple of years in, I decided the printer needed to leave my study. Working from home and spending most of the day in that room, it was taking up space, generating noise, and the smell of ABS is not something you want as a constant companion. It moved to the garage. The tent enclosure — my second by that point — didn't survive the move.

I fitted the printer into DS Webhosting's first rack cabinet: something I've been lugging around for about 25 years that was already secondhand when I bought it. Solid steel, perspex panel on the front. As it turned out, the rack is fairly draughty, and I struggled badly to get a decent ABS print out of it. Almost everything I needed to print at that point was ABS.

Enter Bambu Labs — plug and play comes to 3D printing

I did some research on newer printers. Multicolour-capable machines offering fast print speeds kept coming up, and everything pointed toward Bambu Labs. Not as open source as I'd prefer, but they seemed to offer a genuinely different experience.

I picked up a P1S Combo — a capable printer that comes with the AMS (Automatic Material System), allowing four-colour prints. Got it home, pulled out all the packing material (a significant job in itself), turned it on, loaded filament, and let it calibrate.

Then it was ready to print.

No assembly. No ensuring everything was perfectly aligned before spending an hour manually levelling the bed. It just worked. Plug and play had finally come to 3D printing.

Something happened with this printer that had never happened before — I started printing things simply because I could. Zombie Bart Simpson in full colour? Done. Articulated dragons? No problem. Producing multicolour prints without significant effort changes what you're willing to attempt.

My youngest got interested too. He's currently into Murder Drones (sounds appropriate, I know) — a lot of those characters involve modular, articulated parts. He put the Bambu Handy app on his tablet almost immediately and started looking for things to print. Very quickly he started picking up useful knowledge about different filaments and why you choose different materials for different purposes.

The X2D and the waste problem

Then came the announcement of the X2D — a new Bambu Labs printer with dual extruders. I got my order in quickly.

The biggest frustration with the P1S for multicolour printing was speed and material waste. Each colour change required purging all of the first colour from the tubes and hot end before pulling through the new one. On a small print with 300 layers, that's potentially 300 colour changes. A print weighing 200g might easily generate as much again in purge waste — roughly $5 in filament, gone.

The X2D's second extruder changes this significantly. Its primary purpose is printing supports — instead of going through the entire colour-change process, the second extruder is simply ready to go with its own filament. It's very effective. And if you're willing to sacrifice a small amount of bed space and accept a minor quality trade-off (which takes a trained eye to notice), you can simply use it as a second extruder for colour work.

With two AMS units and the filament tracker option, the slicer makes intelligent decisions about how to produce your print with the least waste. Generally, you want the main colour loaded in a different AMS to the accent colours — though the optimal arrangement depends on the specific print.

A note on supports worth sharing

Using the second extruder for support material is genuinely useful, and there are two approaches worth knowing about:

Using a different material as support. If you're printing in a nice — possibly expensive — filament, you don't want to waste it on supports. For PLA prints, a cheap roll of PETG works well: PLA and PETG don't bond well to each other, so they separate cleanly. Be sensible about colour combinations (black PETG under bright pink PLA will bleed through), but being able to use a completely different material for supports is a genuinely useful option.

Bambu's support interface material. The more elegant solution for most prints. Bambu Labs sells a dedicated support material that's expensive — but you use very little of it. In the slicer, set it as the filament for supports and configure it to apply only at the support/raft interface layer. It prints a single layer between the bulk of the support and your actual part. Supports come away cleanly compared to peeling PLA from PLA. On high-detail prints, the difference is significant.

Where things stand now

I currently run two Bambu Labs printers:

• The P1S — currently in LAN mode, managed with Bambuddy (which deserves its own post). No AMS, but fed from a Creality Space Pi4. This is my prototyping printer. Not ideal for ASA due to the lack of a chamber heater — something I may address — but it handles TPU well. The AMS units generally don't get along with TPU, which also needs drying in advance, so loading it directly through the Space Pi is convenient.
• The X2D — still online, Bambuddy in its future. Two AMS units with a filament tracker.

There are multiple filament boxes, more desiccant than I'd like (most of it having absorbed more moisture than it should and needing recharging), a steady stream of filament deliveries, and a Spoolbuddy set up for tracking — which I'll get properly into once I've moved the X2D over to Bambuddy.

Both printers have barely stopped since I bought them. If they're not producing something I need, they're producing something someone else wants. The youngest is forever asking for parts, which I don't mind at all. If he's going to have toys, I'd rather they require some effort on his part.

Printer specs — how they compare

For context on how much the technology moved over the course of these four machines:

Is it actually a hobby?

Someone asked me a while ago whether I consider 3D printing to be a hobby. My answer, from my own perspective, was no — and I stand by it. In the same way a technically-minded IT person might say "no" if asked whether using a computer is a hobby, 3D printing has for most of its time in my life simply been a tool for producing something I needed.

It's just that now, I'm actually starting to enjoy it.