3D printers don't fix themselves

3D Printers Don't Fix Themselves:

How Maintenance is Part of Digital Fabrication

Blair Subbaraman and Nadya Peek, University of Washington

Slides: https://rb.gy/xuvkf

July 14, 2023

Promise vs. Practice

Expected fabrication outcome based on model

Actual outcome from 3D printing (*from r/FixMyPrint*)

For owners of machines like FDM 3D printers, on-demand access to precision parts is a reality, but this reality also entails the work required to maintain a machine. Parts have to be calibrated, cleaned, repaired, and replaced. While software settings can be repeated, reverted, and refined, the condition of the machine ultimately determines physical consequences for fabrication processes. In this work, we look to maintenance practices to expound the embodied dimensions of 3D printing practice. Home and hobbyist 3D printing is a particularly promising site to begin understanding current digital fabrication machine maintenance, since 3D printing has grown immensely in popularity in the past decade, providing many sites of practice. In our work, we specifically focus on FFF 3D printers, given their widespread adoption.

How do practitioners maintain their 3D printers?

Empirical Setting

To gain empirical insight into this question, we begin with observations of the subredded FixMyPrint, where posts run the gamut from mechanical repair through custom firmware updates. We then conducted interviews and fielded survey responses from members of this community. The community had about 67k members at the time of our study and has since grown to over 100k. Here I'm briefly scrolling through the top posts of this past month. We can see that posts generally include images or a video; in the selection shown here, we can see a question converning aesthetics, or the wavy effect seen on a print, a question concerning mechanical adhesion on a print, on one considering the flow of filament from the nozzle of the machine. And so already we see a breadth of issues that negotiate printer hardware and software.

Methods

Overview of interview (left) and survey (right) participants

Participant	Experience (years)	FFF Printer(s)
P1	2.5	Ender3 Pro

Routines | Repairs | Refinements | Reconciliations

Routines | Repairs | Refinements | Reconciliations

Routines | Repairs | Refinements | Reconciliations

Routines | Repairs | Refinements | Reconciliations

Routines | Repairs | Refinements | Reconciliations

Routines

Practitioners ensure reliable fabrication outcomes with ad-hoc procedures

Cleaning

So like every five, six prints, you gotta take [the textured sheet] off and clean it. Like I mean, clean it... with soap and water and then scrub it off with alcohol and put it back.

- P4

Mechanical Tune-ups

I pay particular attention to vibrations, and sort of resonant sounds of the printer itself. If I notice that the printer is vibrating quite a bit, and it’s almost acoustically amplifying the vibrations from the motors and whatnot. That usually tells me there might be something loose.

- P5

These routines include tasks which might usually be overlooked as unintersting or boring, like cleaning and tightening screws. For example, all of our participants note the importance of cleaning the build plate of their printer with soap, water, alcohol, or other chemicals. We find that scheduling times to do this work reflects broader attitudes towards printing, including compromises between convenience and quality. Over longer timescales, practitioners discuss how mechanical parts need to be tightened and tensioned. P6 described how they're experienced enough to give the machine a visual inspection, where they can check for things like the tensioning of the belts or loose screws. While the printer is running, they're attentive to audiory cues, saying: This sort of tacit knowledge of the machine is built over time, and not easily translated from directive documentation. Altogether, these mundane acts draw attention to wide assortment of tasks which sustain digital fabrication practice.

Repairs

Practitioners gain confidence with machines through mechanical intervention

[My first printer was] just kind of a black box. I didn’t really understand what was going on inside.”

- P9

Practitioners gain confidence with machines through mechanical intervention

You understand more what’s going on. And you get a little more confidence with the mechanics of the machine. I realized oh, the z-axis works by the motor turning this lead screw... And it’s just that simple.

- P9

Refinement

Practitioners use tangible output to tune prints

Because you can usually tell like when you’ve been doing it for a while... if the layer’s going down right. If it’s squished just enough, if it’s not squished enough. If it’s like more squished on one side than the other.

- P6

Reconciliations

Practitioners negotiate digital software with physical practice

I noticed [the clog] because I gradually had more and more under-extrusion. Which at first was I guess totally fine in my eyes, because it never printed totally perfectly before... I tried all the things like settings in my slicer before I actually went for disassembling stuff, because it was also kind of scary. And it seemed like a lot of work. Now I know that it’s not that way. It’s quite easy, it just takes a couple of screws.

- P1

Key Takeaways

Machine maintenance upkeeps practice

Systems to support machine maintenance

Machine as a debugging platform
Treating physical actions on par with digital manipulations
Documenting & sharing maintenance workflows

From our findings, we argue that machine maintenance is core to digital fabrication practice, not auxiliary. While machine maintenance is often considered a temporary road block in the way of 3D printing, we see in our practitioners’ stories how maintenance helps develop skills productive to 3D printing. Our findings also suggest that attempts to fully automate away maintenance are unlikely to account for all relevant factors. While improved machine design and software can certainly minimize uneccessary labor & frustration, a look to the history of the first numerically controlled machines and other large systems suggests a certain inevitablity to maintenance concerns. Instead, we propose design implications which arise from treating maintenance as a core part of digital fabrication. These include treating the machine as a debugging platform so that practitioners can reason about physical output rather than abstract geometry; promoting physical engagement with the machine to make the move from manuals to manual practice less intimidating; and ways to support the documentation and sharing of maintenance workflows to support distributed practice. While we've focused on FDM 3D printers here, we see an opportuntiy for future work which compares the maintenance of other machines which might have different stakes which condition approaches to maintenance.