I love making my own 3D models and 3D printing them at home. The problem with making my own models is that I can go through several, or even dozens, of prototypes before getting to the final product.
Here are the tricks I use to cut down on both time and filament use when making prototype 3D prints at home.
Prototype 3D prints don't need to be finished quality
It's a waste of time and money
copehill077 / MakerWorld
When I first got started 3D printing and making my own 3D models, I printed everything at finish quality—0.20mm layer height, two walls, 15% infill, five top layers and three bottom layers, you name it. It wasn't until several prints in that I realized that was a huge waste of plastic.
When printing a prototype product, I actually use a custom-built print profile that uses far less filament and finishes much faster than normal. There are a handful of settings to change, but it'll help you iterate faster and go from prototype to production in much less time.
Changing your wall count and top/bottom layers speeds up prints drastically
Your prototype prints don't need to be structurally sound
First up, your wall count as well as top and bottom layers are directly related to how long a print takes and how much plastic is used. My custom prototyping profile drastically reduces walls and top/bottom layers. I actually drop everything down to one—one top layer, one bottom layer, and one wall.
This reduction does significantly reduce the structural integrity of the 3D print—but that's okay when prototyping. For instance, when I was designing some RYOBI 18V battery holders , I didn't need a structurally-sound battery holder to simply test the fit.
I sure wouldn't want to use these settings in production, as it wouldn't hold the battery very well at all. But for prototyping the fit and dialing in the design? It saves time and money to reduce the walls and top/bottom layers.
Lightning infill is the real magic
Lightning infill makes for lightning-quick printing
A few years ago, when I was first learning 3D modeling and 3D printing, lightning infill didn't exist, at least, not in the slicers that I was using at the time. Because of this, I typically just turned infill off entirely. I didn't need a structural print, I just needed the shell of the body to test how it fit, so why waste time and money printing infill, right?
Well, I ran into some issues doing this. The top layers would often print pretty poorly as the 3D printer was having to span the entire gap with no infill for the top layer to rest on. This caused the top layer to print poorly and sometimes caused the fit to change because of how it would pull on the super-thin wall.
These days, lightning infill exists, and it's a lifesaver. Lightning infill is just like normal infill, but in the shape of a lightning bolt. This uses far less filament than printing infill patterns while still retaining enough structural rigidity to hold up the top layer as it prints. Lightning infill also helps the print to not feel extremely flimsy and assists in holding the outer wall shape as well.
Using lightning infill will drastically reduce your print time while still keeping some structure in your prototype prints.
You don't have to print the entire project to test certain areas
Smaller prints equal big savings
The biggest time savings when prototyping comes from simply not printing the entire model. Going back to my RYOBI 18V battery holder, I didn't need to print the entire battery holder to make sure the shape I drew to go around the battery terminal was correct.
So, I used the built-in cut functionality of my slicer to trim the model down to just a few layers tall. This made a model that would normally have taken over an hour to print take just 5 minutes. I was able to use this technique to dial in the fit of the shape and then print out a full model (still using the filament- and time-saving techniques here) to check the full fitment of everything.
Once I confirmed everything about the prototype model fit, then I spent the time to print out the full model at finished quality.
Using all these techniques at once offers impressive time and filament savings
You'll be surprised at how fast a roll of filament can disappear when prototyping
As you can see in the pictures above, slicing a hose adapter I designed with my optimal settings compared to my speed settings offers a drastic time and filament savings.
Optimally, I print the hose adapter with five walls and the 3D honeycomb infill pattern. This takes 90 minutes and nearly 69g of filament. Changing things up with the modifications I mentioned above—lightning infill, one wall, one top layer, one bottom layer—it drops to 49 minutes' print time and just 17g of filament.
When I was prototyping this product, I not only did those changes, but I also sliced it down to just test one row of teeth that would grab the hose, which really cut down on print time and filament. Then, I sliced it, so I just had the screw adapter at the top, which also drastically cut down on filament usage and time.
Combining all the techniques is how I'm able to rapid prototype an entire print in just one day without using multiple rolls of filament during the process. If I was to print out the final quality hose adapter every time, I could only get about 14 iterations out of a single roll of filament. That might sound like a lot of revisions, but when prototyping, sometimes you have to go through dozens of designs before landing on the perfect one that works.
This is just one technique that I use whenever I'm making a 3D model from scratch, but you can use this same technique when printing models that you find on MakerWorld , Printables , Thangs , or any other 3D printing website.
If you're ever in doubt about a model and want to test it out first, just dial your print settings back by reducing your walls and top/bottom layers, changing up the infill, and slicing the project down (if needed) before printing. It takes just a few minutes to set up that custom print profile, but it'll save you many hours when prototyping.
