Home » Misc » Why do 3d printers take so long

Why do 3d printers take so long


9 Reasons Why Your 3D Prints Take So Long – Printing It 3D

Print times can be incredibly frustrating to deal with, especially if you are printing for commercial reasons. 3D printers are notorious for taking a very long time to create a piece, which can put a dent in plans or put you under a time crunch.

Here are 9 reasons your 3D prints might be taking so long:

  1. You’re using complicated fill patterns.
  2. Your print has a high fill density.
  3. Your prints have thicker walls. 
  4. High resolution can slow down print time.
  5. Generating more supports can take longer.
  6. You’re heating different printing materials.
  7. The print head travel speed is set low.
  8. A better quality print takes longer to produce.
  9. The size of your piece can increase print time.

Read on for more explanations and tips about how you can increase your print speed.

1. You’re Using Complicated Fill Patterns

Complicated fill patterns take a lot longer to print than simple ones. Fill patterns are a way to make the center of a printed piece strong but also not solid. 

Solid pieces are made of solid printing material, but they take a very long time to complete. If you lower the density and use a complicated fill pattern, you can cut down on time and make a strong piece.

However, sometimes, the fill pattern still takes a long time to print. 

If there is a complicated series of hatches and lines through the center of the piece, it will take a long time to fill. Many different types of fill patterns can be used for various purposes, and they all take different times to print. 

For example: 

  • Low strength fills for models and figurines
  • ‘Standard’ 3D prints with medium strength
  • Functional or practical prints with high strength
  • Flexible 3D prints that need to bend

All of these require different types of fill patterns, and they take different times to print. Some are complicated hexagonal patterns, others are simple lines, but all have different print times. 

Zig zag fill patterns typically are the fastest, but they offer little internal support. Grids and other connected shapes are more effective and can stop vibration while also being quicker. The more unique the form, like a hexagon, the longer the process will take, but it can help the piece’s stability.

To understand why these take so long, you need to understand fill density and how that factors into your prints.

2. Your Print Has a High Fill Density

If your print has a high fill density, it can take a lot longer to print as well. This means that you have a much denser fill pattern, and the piece is more solid.

Dense fill patterns are great if you need the object to be sturdy. Dense objects can handle impact damage more and are less likely to break if they are used. 

This is important for things you are using every day or that are expected to do specific things. For example, if you have printed a piece of tubing for a device or pipe system, you need to make the density strong and handle what the tube is pushing around.

This density takes time and will extend the active printer period. The printer head has to go over every single line in the printing pattern. 

If you want to lower your print time, you can reduce the density. However, it would help if you kept in mind how much you want the item to be used and how strong it needs to be.

3. Your Prints Have Thicker Walls

Thick print walls are also essential to make sturdy pieces. These make sure that your item won’t break and you can’t punch through it quickly. 

Wall thickness is the actual width of the outer shell of the item you’ve printed. The wall is what the internal fill will be constructed against, and it’s essential to have a thick wall as good support.

Thick walls take longer to print. They add a different section of the piece that has to be shaped, and the fill pattern has to develop with it.

You can technically lower wall thickness to get a faster print time, but it is not recommended. You need to check the stability of your printed piece before lowering the wall thickness.

Some prints that aren’t going to be used daily (like models or display figures) can be safely made with lower wall thickness. Other things like pipes or multi-function items may need a thicker print wall. 

4. Higher Resolution Can Slow Down Print Time

Using a higher resolution is another reason why your prints might be taking longer. 

Resolution is a word for image quality. This is what makes an image blurry or pixelated or what makes it high definition. This same premise can be applied to 3D printed pieces.

For example, if you want to make a replica of your favorite TV or video game character, there are a lot of pieces from their costume and associated props that are small, fine details. You need a higher resolution to capture them.

Higher resolution means that these details are being printed better, and the final piece will look better overall. They can capture incredibly tiny details, like single buttons on a figure’s jacket or curl definition in hair.

The way that printers naturally try to improve resolution is by decreasing the layer height. 

Decreasing the number of layers improves the resolution by making the printer produce more of them. However, more layers, especially thin ones, will dramatically increase the print time. Every new layer is another time that the print head has to go over the piece.

If you lower the layer count, you can reduce the print time. However, you will miss out on the fine details that 3D printers can make. This may cause your print to look pixelated or almost blurry.

This is also what gives many 3D-printed objects their lined look. The lines mean that the printer used a low layer count for what the thing is. 

These lines can be sanded down and modified to improve the physical appearance, but that is more work you have to do later after the print has thoroughly cooled. Increasing the layer count reduces the work and makes it even easier to prep the object later.

5. Generating More Supports Can Take Longer

Your print could also be taking a long time because it needs a lot of supports.

Supports are small, thin bits of printed material that suspended parts of a print are built on top of. They make sure the printer moves evenly over each layer and give the printer head a space to build on.

Let’s say you are making a model of a TV character waving. A line from the ground does not support their arms. The 3D printer needs a place to start constructing the arm from. Otherwise, the print material will fall to the ground. 

Supports fix that problem. If you have an object that needs a lot of supports, this can drastically add more print time.

If a piece needs a lot of supports, it requires a lot of supports. This means that you can’t always cut down on the build time by messing around with supports. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and sink the time.

However, you can change the settings to make sure your piece is being printed with the least number of supports possible, and you can change the thickness of the supports. 

This will cut down on time and lower your overall waste. Supports take a lot of extra material and can be a big waste, especially if you use an expensive filament.

Supports can also take a lot more time after the piece has been fully printed. Supports need to be carefully removed and can take a lot of time to sand traces away. Sanding can also wear down the wall thickness of your print and cause structural issues.

It’s recommended that you use a cutter or snipper to get the cleanest cuts on both your supports and filaments. A clean-cut will save you even more time and get into small places your fingers cannot.

This Flush Cutter from BLEDS on Amazon.com is a great choice and a necessary tool for anyone doing a lot of 3D printing. Using the fine tip of the cutter will reduce stress on your piece and get a cleaner cut, so you don’t have to sand as much.

6. You’re Heating Different Printing Materials

Different printing materials take different times to heat up and move through the feeder tubes. This means that a printer may need time to prepare the fibers for extrusion properly. 

If you want to work with more difficult filaments, you need to consider how long the preparation process will take. You can’t necessarily cut down on this time, but you can prepare for it, so you aren’t strapped for time.

On the other side of this, materials also need different times to cool down properly. Removing a print from the platform too soon can damage it and warp the plastic. You have to give your print time to cool before removing it.

7. The Print Head Travel Speed Is Set Low

Print head travel speed is another reason a print might be taking longer.

The print head is programmed to travel at a certain speed depending on the filament, the thickness of certain sections and avoid putting extra stress on the device. They are also very heavy, and it can be difficult for them to pick up speed.

Changing printer speed can speed up the process, but you may lose quality. Slowly increase the speed over several different prints to see if you lose quality. Look at the little details in your print and see if they are visible. 

If you don’t, then you can enjoy the higher speed and cut down on print time! If you do lose quality, you should slow the speed down until you find the sweet spot.

8. A Better Quality Print Takes Longer To Produce

If you want a higher quality print, it will take more time. All of the other factors outlined above impact the print time, and it could affect the actual longevity of the piece.

If you want a huge and accurate piece, it’s going to take a while to complete. The printing process is long, and if you want it done right, you need to be patient. The layers need to be thin, and it has to have enough time to cool.

Rushing the process can ruin a piece, and it won’t turn out the way you want. There are also concerns about structural stability because a piece that hasn’t adequately cooled and has improper fill patterns can easily break. 

Fill patterns need to be built carefully to make sure your piece doesn’t collapse in on itself. Fill patterns make sure your piece isn’t going to snap and break at the lowest amount of pressure. Giving the printer time to arrange them properly is crucial to creating a long-lasting piece.

In addition, speed can leave many sharp corners on your piece that will need to be sanded. They may also be in a place where you can’t remove them. Ouch!

9. The Size of Your Piece Can Increase Print Time

The size of the piece you’re printing is also going to determine the printing time. Smaller pieces take less time to print overall.

However, smaller pieces lose resolution unless you have a very fine printer tip. These can be very expensive, and in general, the larger the piece, the more accurate the resolution can be.

Larger pieces take time, more materials, and they can be very long to print. The amount of space alone can be a challenge, so you may have to turn to a part-based system to fit everything onto one printer platform.

The benefits can’t be understated, though. You can get exponentially more resolution on larger prints than smaller ones. 

Not only that but using a part-based system can take the stress off your printer. Taking a larger project piece by piece means allowing your printer to cool down between parts. Not forcing it to finish a large piece in one go will make your printer last a lot longer.

Why Are 3D Printers So Slow?

3D printing has become cheap and reliable over the years. Beginner-friendly materials such as PLA and PETG have made home manufacturing more accessible than before. Unfortunately, the actual 3D printing process remains excruciatingly slow, in many cases requiring several days' worth of printing.

Why do 3D printers still go about their business at a glacial pace, when they have been available to consumers for over a decade?

The answer lies in the engineering and production challenges behind making 3D printing commercially viable. Let’s take a look at these challenges and a promising technology that could make 3D printing faster for everyone.

Bed-Slingers Don’t Like Moving Fast

The first clue lies in a typical consumer 3D printer’s appearance itself. Searching Amazon for 3D printers yields results that look virtually indistinguishable from one another. That’s an unfortunate by-product of consumer 3D printers being based on the Prusa i3 design. There’s apparently no better approach to mass manufacturing cheap printers. Unfortunately, this pursuit of cost-efficiency comes at the cost of speed.

Let’s take a quick look at the Prusa i3 motion system to understand why that’s the case.

Your average consumer-grade 3D is cheap primarily because it is uncomplicated. This simplicity extends to their motion system as well. The X-axis, for example, comprises the print head moving along a length of V-slot aluminum extrusion. The Z-axis, in turn, moves the entire X-axis assembly up and down. That might seem like a lot of weight, but it isn’t a major concern because 3D printers move along the Z-axis infrequently and only a fraction of a millimeter at a time.

However, the Y-axis setup of such printers is definitely suboptimal. This poor axis is tasked with the Herculean task of moving the entire bed, which also happens to be the heaviest component in a 3D printer. To print fast, you ideally want the moving components to be as light as possible. It is already tricky to quickly move a print head weighing 150 grams, while maintaining micrometer precision.

Now, imagine doing the same with a 1.5kg bed instead. Not surprisingly, 3D printers employing the Prusa i3 design are colloquially named bed-slingers for this reason.

What Happens When You Print Fast Anyway?

We have figured out why your average 3D printer is slow. But what if we were to disable firmware limits on print speed and acceleration to print fast anyway? The cost of moving too fast goes beyond putting tremendous stress on the stepper motors and causing them to overheat. Print quality is the first casualty in the fight between a weak motor and stubborn mass of a heavy bed. This manifests as ringing or ghosting caused by excessive vibration associated with printing fast.

In extreme cases, the 3D printer components can shake themselves loose over time. Although it is easy to re-tighten screws, printing fast on Prusa i3-style often leads to irreversible wear on the motion components. The worst hit are the cheap V-slot rollers used in the motion system of such printers. The plastic wheels running along V-shaped tracks on aluminum extrusions wear out significantly when subjected to fast printing speeds.

The typical 3D printer based on the Prusa i3 design can’t print fast with any degree of quality or long-term reliability. But what about printers based on different designs. There should be some viable alternatives suitable for printing fast, right?

Delta Printers: Cheap and Fast, but Inaccurate

Delta 3D printers are designed from the ground up to be fast. Their light print head is quicker and more controllable due to its inherently lower momentum. Moreover, the Delta design uses fewer components than its bed-slinger counterpart, which makes it even cheaper to manufacture. Printers that are cheap as well as fast sound perfect, but then why don’t we see enough of them?

Image Credit: Anycubic and Flsun.

Printers based on the Delta design compromise a lot in their pursuit of speed. Their compact and lightweight print heads make it impossible to implement a direct drive extruder. Learn more about this technology in our direct drive extruder guide. Meanwhile, this Bowden-only extruder restriction makes Delta printers incapable of handling flexible filaments, which hurts their versatility.

However, their biggest compromise comes in the form of reduced print quality, especially while printing large models that are spread out horizontally. Furthermore, the surface print quality achieved by a Delta isn’t comparable to bed-slingers. This is further exacerbated by the circular bed that limits build volume, and their general propensity to excel only at tall prints.

These limitations are severe enough for the consumer 3D printing industry to have relegated Delta printers to a niche despite their impressive speed and cost-effectiveness.

CoreXY Printers: Speed Comes at a Price

The quickest printers around are based on CoreXY kinematics, as explained in our beginner’s guide to Voron 3D printers. This is a sophisticated motion system where the bed is largely stationary, but the significantly lighter print head is moved at lightning quick speeds. Unlike Delta printers, the CoreXY design maintains quality while allowing the use of direct drive extruders.

Image Credit: Paul Nokel/Voron Design

The only problem is that the extreme complexity and high costs involved make these printers unviable for consumer 3D printing. As such, CoreXY printers remain restricted to niche open-source projects aimed at 3D printing enthusiasts. That isn’t surprising considering how the average CoreXY 3D printer costs anywhere between $1000 and $2000 in parts alone.

Consumer 3D printer manufacturers still haven’t figured out how to make this technology cheap and approachable enough for mainstream users.

Speed Is a Luxury 3D Printers Can’t Afford

To sum this up, fast 3D printing is an expensive affair. You can either have a cheap Delta printer that goes quick at the cost of quality and build volume, or you can spend a fortune on a CoreXY machine. Neither of these extremes sit well with consumers.

And that’s why virtually every consumer 3D printer is based on the Prusa i3 design. These printers might be slow, but they nevertheless strike a good balance between price, features, and performance. Speed is an unfortunate casualty of manufacturing 3D printers with mass market appeal.

Why mass 3D printing is still not a trend

Photo: asharkyu / Shutterstock, Chris McGrath / Getty Images

The production of goods with individual characteristics is one of the trends in the consumer market. However, personification has not yet become a popular phenomenon. Is this idea promising for business development?

When the problem of shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for doctors became acute, the owners of 3D printers united in the volunteer movement #3Dfor doctors. They began to print adapters, which made it possible to connect diving masks with virus-bacterial filters. Manufacturers were able to quickly develop and release adapters in various configurations for popular types of masks found in stores, quickly covered burning needs and saved many lives - and then began to make full-fledged protective masks and shields.

Adapters for masks - example of a customized product (made to order. - RBC Trends ), that is, adapted to different types of masks. How quickly manufacturers were able to design and release a new product with unique characteristics demonstrates the main advantages of 3D printing.

3D printing allows you to create products based on the preferences or personal characteristics of the buyer - personalized goods. This idea arose in the early 2000s, but so far, contrary to forecasts and the rapid development of additive technologies, has not become a mass phenomenon.

Personalization Challenges

Nike and Adidas have been experimenting with 3D printing for sneakers since 2012. The goal is to create sports shoes in the presence of the buyer according to the individual characteristics of his foot. For example, Adidas announced in 2015 that a consumer could walk into a store, spend a couple of minutes on the treadmill, and immediately receive a printed pair of running shoes that take into account the contours of the foot and pressure points while running. At the same time, Nike announced the possibility of printing shoes directly at the customer's home. To do this, you just need to download the file with the parameters of the sneakers and the characteristics of the foot from the corporation's website to your home 3D printer.

However, by 2020 these opportunities remained unrealized. In practice, everything turned out to be more difficult.

The point is the high cost of such products: the consumer is not ready to pay for customized sneakers many times more expensive when you can choose the right model from thousands of more affordable options.

Customization does not take root among automakers either. For example, in 2017, BMW launched the MINI Yours Customized service, which allows you to customize a new or previously purchased MINI car using decorative elements printed on a 3D printer. For example, it was possible to order individual side body inserts, trim parts, LED door sills and LED door projectors. However, the service is currently unavailable.

Where personification has taken root

So far, 3D printing is most actively used in medicine, where it is vital to take into account the individual characteristics of a person. First of all, the technology is useful in orthopedics and dentistry for the manufacture of prostheses and implants. Customization is especially in demand in the production of prosthetic limbs. With the help of 3D scanning, the parameters of the patient are determined, a digital model of the prosthesis is created, which is printed on a 3D printer. In this case, you can create a unique design of the artificial limb. For example, they produce children's prostheses stylized as favorite movie characters.

Another area where 3D printing is being used to customize products is in the jewelry and fashion jewelry industry. There are enterprises that produce mass products using 3D printing, for example, the American brands LACE, Nervous System and others. Customization is carried out, first of all, by small studios and workshops offering exclusive jewelry. They print digital models created according to customer sketches or cast them from precious materials using 3D printed molds.

Economics of innovation Living hand: who creates bionic prostheses in Russia

As for the majority of goods, the price works here in 99% of cases. Especially when the share of online sales is growing. You type in Google "buy a fountain pen is the cheapest" - and no matter where you are, you buy this fountain pen cheaper. This is where mass production wins.

You can think of many products that could be customized. But you need to be clear about who you will sell them to. Are there enough people willing to overpay for customization to keep your business alive? “In your calculations, you need to take into account real consumer demand, and not the desire to make money on hype,” says Vlasov. “The conclusion is simple: personalized production is possible when it will give approximately the same price as mass production.”

Denis Alekseev, Head of R&D and Production at JSC ROBBO (educational robotics, Skolkovo resident), is confident that personalized production will become a popular trend of the future. But in order to attract the mass consumer to this segment, it is necessary to overcome a number of technical and organizational issues. For the end user, the process of ordering a customized product should be as simple as possible: with a few steps, order what he wants, while receiving the finished product quickly and conveniently. The cost of individual products may be higher, but this increase must be of value to the customer.

Main disadvantages of 3D printing:

  • low production speed;

  • often low quality products;

  • high cost of the product when trying to mass production.

How to reduce the cost of a customized product?

The cost of the finished product primarily depends on the materials for 3D printing. One way to cut costs is to produce consumables yourself.

Another option to reduce the cost of consumables is possible with the development of additive technologies and the development of new printing materials.

The main question is: who will buy it?

Entrepreneurs will be able to develop the production of personalized goods if they find the answer to the question: who will buy them? Businesses that already operate in a particular market and feel the needs of their audience can feel the demand. It is almost impossible to guess - you need to be sure of the demand.

Artur Gerasimov notes that small-scale production is promising for business development using additive technologies. One of the areas of work of his company Innovax is the production of parts and mechanisms by order of industrial enterprises from the automotive industry, instrument making, and the aerospace industry.

A customization boom will occur when a customer can get a personalized product at the same price and as quickly as a mass product. Therefore, it is up to the development of technologies and services.

Subscribe to the RBC Trends Telegram channel and stay up to date with current trends and forecasts about the future of technology, economics, education and innovation.

Fixing the 20 Most Common 3D Printing Problems

3DPrintStory