Skip to main content

3D Printing Workflow

Our printers are Bambu Lab machines — a fleet of X1 Carbons plus an H2C. You prepare a file in Bambu Studio (the slicer), which cuts your model into layers and generates instructions the printer follows.

The printers live inside enclosure tents, and there are air-quality rules you have to follow before you open one — closed tent while printing, and a timed air-out before you pull a print. Read 3D Printing Air Quality before your first print; it isn't optional.

For getting a print made, the two routes — join the queue, or slice and print it yourself in the Makerspace — are documented on Makers Tools and the 3D Print Queue page. This page is about the part that's yours: making a model that prints well and slicing it sensibly.

Bambu Lab's own documentation is thorough and current — start with their Introduction to Bambu Studio and Print Settings reference.

Design decisions that happen before you slice​

Orientation is a strength decision. A printed part is layers glued together, and it's much weaker across the layer lines than along them. Hang weight on a hook printed standing upright and it splits along a layer line. The same hook printed lying flat on the plate runs the load along the layers instead of peeling them apart, and holds. Ask which direction the load comes from, then orient the part so the layers run with it, not across it.

Shallow overhangs need support. Plastic printed out over thin air droops. Bambu Studio's support threshold angle is 30 degrees, measured from horizontal: a surface sloping at less than 30 degrees off the bed gets support generated for it, and anything steeper than that prints fine on its own. Their threshold angle documentation explains the setting. Before you reach for supports, though, try changing the geometry — a chamfer or fillet often removes the need entirely, and prints cleaner than supports ever will.

Design for the nozzle. Nothing thinner than about two nozzle widths will print as a solid wall. Very fine detail, sharp knife edges, and text under a few millimeters tall come out mushy.

Walls do more for strength than infill. Print time and filament both scale with how much plastic is actually in the part, and a couple of extra perimeters buys more strength than filling the middle. A part with thicker walls and modest infill is usually both stronger and faster to print than the same part filled solid.

See Tolerance and Fit for the clearance to leave between a printed part and whatever it has to mate with.

Slicing in Bambu Studio​

  1. Import your file. Export 3MF from Fusion rather than STL — see Exporting Your Design for why.
  2. Select the right printer and nozzle. Our machines are not all identical; picking the wrong profile is a wasted plate.
  3. Select the filament actually loaded. PLA and PETG print at very different temperatures. Bambu's filament compatibility table covers what each material needs.
  4. Orient and place the part on the plate, per the decisions above.
  5. Set layer height. Thinner layers look better and take longer. For a functional bracket, a standard layer height is fine; save fine layers for parts someone will look at closely.
  6. Add supports only where you need them. Bambu's support settings and support painting guides show how to place supports on specific overhangs instead of blanketing the whole model.
  7. Slice, then actually look at the preview. Step through the layers. Look for parts floating with nothing beneath them, walls that came out single-thickness, and a first layer that's smaller than you expected.
  8. Check the time and material estimate. If a part is going to run eight hours, that's a scheduling fact your team needs to know today, not tomorrow.

Five printers, eighteen students, and a semester with real deadlines:

  • Sequence your prints. Print the part you need for a test fit first, not the decorative one.
  • Fail small. Print a small test section of a big part to check fit before committing to the full thing.
  • A reprint costs the same time twice. Ten minutes checking the preview is the cheapest insurance available.

When a print fails​

Bambu Lab documents the common failure modes with photographs, which is far more useful than a text description:

Identify the failure before you change anything. A part that came loose from the plate, a part that warped, and a part that printed at the wrong scale look different and have different fixes — and one of those three is a units problem in your export, not a printer problem at all.

Log the failure in your journal with a photo. A photographed failure plus what you changed next is the clearest evidence of your process you can produce.