What wet filament actually is and why it ruins prints “Wet filament” is the hobby term for a 3D printing filament that has absorbed atmospheric moisture. All the plastics we print — PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA, TPU, nylon, polycarbonate — are hygroscopic to varying degrees, meaning they pull water vapor out of the air and…
Why a camera is the first OctoPrint upgrade worth installing OctoPrint camera setup is not something I bothered with for my first year of printing, and I regret that more than almost any other decision in this hobby. I resisted putting a camera on my OctoPrint instance for longer than I should have. The turning…
Why cure time is not a single number How long to cure resin prints is the question every new SLA owner asks by their third print, and the honest answer is “it depends.” The first resin print I ever cured sat under a 405 nm UV station for forty minutes because I panicked and assumed…
What “strongest” actually means for PETG “Strongest PETG” is an incomplete question until you specify which kind of strength. Tensile strength — how much force the print takes before a wall pulls apart — is one metric. Impact strength, the ability to absorb a sudden hit without cracking, is another. Layer adhesion, the glue between…
The kinematic style most beginners buy without realizing it When I teach new hobbyists at my local maker space, the same question surfaces within ten minutes of them seeing my Ender 3 next to a Voron 2.4: “Why does your bed move on that one and not on the other one?” That difference is the…
Why PEEK Demands the Highest Temperatures of Any Common 3D Filament Polyether ether ketone (PEEK) sits at the top of the engineering thermoplastic ladder for 3D printing. It’s a semi-crystalline polymer with a melting point of 343°C and a glass transition temperature (Tg) of 143°C. To print it well, every thermal zone of the printer…
Why TPU Was Slow — And What Changed For the first decade of consumer 3D printing, TPU was a slow-printing curiosity. Bowden setups physically couldn’t push soft filament fast — it would buckle inside the PTFE tube and underextrude into a stringy mess. Even direct drive setups struggled because hotends with low flow rates couldn’t…
The Short Answer: PETG Has Moderate UV Resistance PETG (polyethylene terephthalate glycol) holds up to ultraviolet light better than PLA and HIPS, but noticeably worse than ASA, ASA-CF, and polycarbonate. In direct sunlight at temperate-zone latitudes, an unmodified PETG print will retain most of its mechanical properties for 6–12 months, start visibly yellowing within 12–18…
What OctoPrint Is and Why It’s Still the Default in 2026 OctoPrint is an open-source web interface that runs on a small computer (typically a Raspberry Pi) connected to your 3D printer’s USB port. Once installed, it gives you a browser-based control panel for starting prints, monitoring temperatures, watching a webcam feed, and uploading G-code…
What a Direct Drive Extruder Actually Is A direct drive extruder mounts the filament-feeding motor — the extruder — directly on top of the hotend, on the moving print head. When the firmware tells the motor to push 1mm of filament, that filament travels maybe 20–40mm down through gears and into the melt zone. Compare…