Once you receive and unbox your Lulzbot machine you might be so eager to print things, you skip a few steps in the setup process and all of a sudden you are having all sorts of difficulties that you can’t understand. It happens, what you need is some sort of online guide to help you grasp the concepts behind printing with a Lulzbot printer.
Coincidentally, we have put together this simple step-by-step guide to help ensure you set your printer up and understand what needs to happen to ensure a successful print. We’ll go ahead and assume that you have followed the unboxing guide that comes with your printer. If you can’t find it or even if you just want to have a preview of what’s to come; view that guide here.
There are two ways that you can print out of the box on a Lulzbot Taz printer; but only one way if you are using the Mini. We are going to walk you through tethering your printer to your PC with the included USB cable (you can tether the Taz, but it takes up quite a bit of desktop real estate so we don’t typically see it being done).
We assume that you have done a couple of things before starting here:
- Followed the Unboxing Guide, start to finish, for your printer.
- Ensure your printer is powered on, in a position where it has around 30cm clearance in front of and behind for the print bed to move without colliding with anything?
- Have some filament handy to load up and print with.
- If you are going to be printing via a USB tether, ensure that the connections are correctly connected and ready to go.
Step 1: Download and install Cura
Visit https://www.lulzbot.com/cura and download the Cura version for your operating system. Once downloaded, follow the installation process all the way through.
Step 2: Install Printer
Select the printer you are using from this menu.
Step 3: Configure tool head
Select the tool head you are using from this menu.
Step 4: Download and load up the Rocktopus STL
Once you have configured Cura, the interface will load up and you will be met with a badass looking Rocktopus on the print bed. If the Rocktopus didn’t load up by default (which almost never happens the first time you run Cura, you can download it here.
Step 5: Select filament type and quick print profile
There are a ton of options in Cura that we go over in other tutorials, today we are just going to be printing the stock-standard Rocktopus. In the left-hand menu on the Cura home interface, you will see a couple of drop down menus for filament and profile options. Go ahead and select the filament you will be using to print your Rocktopus and ensure you have it on the Standard quality setting.
Step 6: Open printer control
That’s all the Cura configuring you’ll need to do for your first print. Go ahead and open the printer control interface which is in the top-left of the workspace.
Step 7: Heat hot-end up to >200°C
You now have a window that gives you full control of your printer. In this window, you have axis movement buttons, axis homing buttons, extrusion/retraction control, temperature controls as well as the console where you can send G-Code commands directly to the printer. Go ahead and set the temperature of the hot end to 200+°C.
Step 7: Remove/Replace filament in tool head
When your printer gets up to 200°C you will want to loosen the retainer on the tool head holding your fingers on the screw heads and pinching toward the outside of the printer. Once it loosens drop the hinged idler away from the filament. Pinch the filament and pull it out of the tool head. Easy!
Raise your filament spool holder out from the side of the printer and load the spool with the filament facing down. Feed the filament into the feed hole in the tool head then replace the hinged idler and reset the retainer back to its original position.
Step 9: Purge filament using printer control.
Now that you have changed filament there will be some residual filament left in the tool head you will want to remove. To do this, you will just purge the tool head until you see a uniform extrusion. In the printer control interface click the ‘Extrude 10’ button until you see a nice uniform extrusion coming from your tool head. Once you have that you are good to go!
Step 10: Print!
Go ahead and select the print option from the top of your printer control interface. The printer will then begin its warm-up, clean, auto-level sequence before starting your print. At this point anything on the tool head or print bed will be at relatively high temps, so make sure you don’t touch/burn yourself of any of it by keeping your hands out of the way.
Step 11: Removal of Print
When your print finished your heated bed will be at around 110°C and the optimal removal temperature for our filament is around 50-60°C. This means there is a cool-down phase that you should not avoid. The bed will retract along the y-axis, making it difficult to remove the print anyway. Once your print is sufficiently cooled the printer will bring the bed to the most forward position for you to remove your print.
Because we have these wonderful heated, PEI covered print beds we get easy and great adhesion to the bed for our prints. The flip side is we now have to get those prints off the fantastically adhered surface and try to not damage the bed or print. Grab the blue handled knife that comes in your Lulzbot toolkit. We are going to use the sharp edge of the knife to slowly separate the print from the bed, one edge at a time. At this point, your print can be quite easy to break so ensure you take your time and use the sharp edge to get some leverage.
Step 12: Admire your hard work.
Once you get your print off the bed in one piece, take a really close up look at it. Get familiar with aspects of the print such as the height of the layers, the finish of the outside shell and obviously any imperfections on the print. The first thing I did was setup another Rocktopus print at the High-Quality setting as well as one at the High Speed setting for comparison, but that’s up to you.
Thanks for taking a look at this tutorial, I hope it cleared any questions up that you had about printing with a Lulzbot machine. If you have any suggestions or elaborations you want to share with the community and us, let us know below!
