Do you recognize this? Ummm… ya.. me neither! This is what happens when a 3D print goes bad. I was printing a triple arch support for my replacement arches and apparently I didn’t get good adhesion between the print bed and the arch support it was printing. Sometime in the middle of the night things took a turn for the worse and of course the printer doesn’t know that and it kept on trying to print. The resulting birdsnest just kept on getting larger and larger.

If you decided to jump into 3D printing a few things I learned early on.

• Make sure that you set your software with the correct type of material. ABS, PETG, PLA all print differently and require different temperatures for printing and for the bed adhesion.
• Do the proper calibrations… Print the calibration cubes and the temperature towers and the like to determine what settings are going to work best. This is probably the most frustrating part about 3D printing. Getting your printer dialed in takes time and lots of prints of calibration tools.
• Don’t get frustrated when things don’t work as expected. Simply try again. The materials are not that expensive and a few failed prints can teach you a lot!
• There are a ton of things on the Internet about your specific printer and lots of tips and tricks. Read and research!

I restarted the print.. it did finally finish.