Top and bottom layers are the solid surface skins on the top and bottom of a 3D print. They’re separate from the walls and infill, and the number you set directly affects how solid and clean those surfaces look. Too few and you get gaps. Too many and you’re wasting material on overkill surface thickness.…
Why PLA Slicer Settings Matter More Than the Printer The same PLA filament on the same printer will produce dramatically different results depending on slicer settings. Get temperature, speed, retraction, and cooling right and PLA prints clean, strong parts every time. Get them wrong and you get stringing, warping, weak layer adhesion, or surface quality…
What Warping Is and Why It Happens Warping is when the corners or edges of a 3D print lift off the build plate during printing. The base of the print peels away from the bed, the part deforms, and in severe cases the print detaches entirely mid-job. The physics behind it are straightforward. Plastic expands…
What Stringing Is and Why It Happens Stringing is the thin threads of filament left between parts of a print when the nozzle travels across an open gap. The nozzle moves from one section to another, and instead of leaving nothing behind, it drags a fine strand of melted plastic across the gap. On a…
What Under Extrusion Is and How to Spot It Under extrusion happens when your printer deposits less filament than the slicer expects. The nozzle is moving and the filament is feeding, but not enough plastic is coming out to fill the path correctly. You will see it as gaps between infill lines, weak or porous…
Printing threads and precise holes in FDM requires accounting for how FDM slightly under-sizes holes and the specific design constraints that make threads printable versus fragile. Get the tolerances right and your printed threads work on the first try. Get them wrong and you have a part that either won’t thread or strips after two…
The Nozzle Nobody Thinks About (Until Something Goes Wrong) Most 3D printers ship with a 0.4mm brass nozzle, and most people print every single job with that exact nozzle for the entire life of the printer. For the majority of use cases, that is the right call. But knowing why and knowing the specific situations…
Variable layer height lets your slicer automatically use fine layers where the model has curved or detailed surfaces and coarser layers on flat sections where layer lines aren’t visible anyway. The result is a print that looks like it was printed at a fine layer height throughout, but takes significantly less time because it uses…
The extruder system on your 3D printer determines how filament gets pushed to the hotend. Two configurations dominate: direct drive (extruder on the print head, right above the hotend) and Bowden (extruder mounted remotely, filament fed through a PTFE tube). Both work well; they make different trade-offs that matter for specific use cases. Direct Drive:…
3D printing has its own vocabulary and most beginner guides assume you already know it. This glossary covers every term you’ll encounter in the first few months of printing, defined plainly without unnecessary jargon. Bookmark it and refer back when a tutorial mentions something unfamiliar. Essential 3D Printing Terms A-G AMS (Automatic Material System): Bambu…