Alright guys, so we've gone through Cura, we've took a look at the basic settings and the advanced settings, and we're pretty much ready to print. I've got that standard profile selected for the PLA poly white material, which I have just here in the LulzBot Green as well, so we'll get a cool looking rock to push print off the bed. So what we're going to do is we're going to need to change our filaments out, I've got some filament already loaded into the Mini, we've been printing earlier today. So we're going to go through some basic things that we can do. Now first, the first thing I like to do is make sure my print bed is nice and clean. Now lucky for us, this is a new PEI sheet, essentially it's got no glue or anything left on it. But if we wanted to clean it off, all we'd need to do is grab out some paper towel, some isopropyl alcohol or some water, depending on what you've had on the bed. Essentially just wet it, give it a wipe down and make sure it's all dry. It's very easy to do. So isopropyl alcohol and some paper towel is always a good option there.

Now to remove our filament, we need to get access to our tool head, but unfortunately the home position for the LulzBot Mini is set, so I can't really get into the tool head. So this is what we're going to do, we're going to go into our printer control. Now if you have a printer with a control panel on the printer, you'll be able to do this all from your printer, but the Mini is just a desktop printer, it only has this USB header. So I have to use the control interface within Cura to be able to control it. What we're going to do, go in here, we've connected, we've got the printer temperature up the top here and the bed temperature just there. I'll move that into the middle here. And what we're going to do is we're just going to move that X-axis across, we might move it the other way, and get it nice and central. So I've got that nice and central here. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and remove that filament and you can see it's not going to come out. Now that tool head is just at room temperature, there's no way that I'm going to be able to pull that out.

As we've seen in previous videos, that tool head has some mouldings and stuff all the way through past that heat sink, and the filament's actually melted in there, sort of formed into place. So what I'm going to need to do is raise the extruder temperature, and once I raise it, it'll make the plastic malleable and I'll be able to pull it out nice and easily. So I'll go ahead and do that, and we'll set the temperature to be 230 as it's an ABS filament, and we'll just wait until that's ready. Alrighty guys, now that we've seen our printer temperature rising on the graph here, obviously this is a graph of time versus temperature, and the red line representing our extruder temperature that we've set at 230-degrees. In the top of this window, we can actually see 234 as the extruder temperature and 27 as the bed temperature. So, knowing that it's up at around 230-degrees and we're using an ABS filament, 230-degrees is perfect, and we'll just pull that out of our tool head. So what we did there, was we grabbed those two bolts, I'll just replace them to show you. So these two bolts here have some springs, we don't actually have to press them in, all we need to do is put our two fingers on here and lift up.

So we lift that up, and we can pull this piece of plastic out of the way. Now we can see, we've got access to our entire reel of filament, and it's nice and easy to just remove from there, you can see there's a little bit of a tag of filament on the end. Trying our best to not tangle up our filament, we're just going to feed it back through the hole in the filament reel, without tangling it. Just like that. Awesome. So I've taken that one off, and I've got my Polylite PLA from Polymaker here, that we're going to be using. So again, just whack that on our filament spool holder, your printer might be a little bit different, but they all have spool holders, so don't fret about that. And what we'll be doing is essentially just feeding this piece of filament down into the tiny black hole that's all the way in here, which feeds down into our tool head against that hopped bolt there. So once I've put it in there, I can just fix it into place, and then replace that tensioner back on. Usually when you get your printer, that tensioner will be at a perfect tension, you don't really need to go too far, but essentially if you've got the tip of that bolt coming out this side, you're pretty sweet on tension on your filament.

You don't want to over-tension it, especially with softer filaments like PLA, it can grind out. We'll get into that in a while. So we've got our filament loaded up now, our ABS prints at 230-degrees, plus PLA prints at say 190 to 210. So we're going to have to drop our temperature down to print with that, but we don't have to do that manually. Like I said before, we selected the PLA from Polymaker already as our print profile, which is over here. Now, essentially what we've done, we've prepared that with all those settings, and all the G-code is essentially ready within this program. When I click control, the settings that are on that print bed are essentially imported into my printer control window. If I go in here and I've connected to my printer, obviously I've got all the options for my printer, but I don't need to do anything other than a simple heat up of my filament toolhead, only because we've just swapped it out. If this was already loaded in and ready to go, we'd just be pressing print, but with this filament, as we've just swapped it out, we're going to purge it.

So we're just going to drop that temp down to about 190, which is pretty good for PLA, and we're going to extrude some filament and make sure that it's coming out nice and evenly, nice and consistently, so we can get started with our print. So we'll just wait for that temperature to die down to about 190. Alright, guys, so we've got our temperature at 190-degrees, which is good for PLA filament to extrude, and we're just going to go ahead and click on this down arrow, which will extrude 10 mils of filament, and we can see that off the bat, we're going to get some ABS coming out of that toolhead. Hopefully, we can just push enough PLA through there to get our ABS. There we go. So we can see it coming out there, nice and slowly, but surely. Now remember, ABS will still come out of the toolhead at that temperature, but it's not the optimal extrusion temperature for it to do so. So we can see that discoloured filament, we can see that that green is eventually coming out of the red. Usually, four or five clicks of this button will get you a nicely purged toolhead. Almost there, I'd say. I'm going to look at that little bit of filament.

That filament, you can see that almost there. It's a bit orange still, though. There we go. That appears to be almost perfect. Be careful grabbing that filament as it comes out of the toolhead. You want to give it a few seconds to cool down, because it can be quite hot. It is molten plastic, after all. Alrighty, so I'm ready to print. Essentially, I've got my model. My model's prepared. My printer is prepared. My filament is ready to go. It's on the spool holder. It's fed into the toolhead. We're all ready to go. So what we're going to do is go ahead and click print. The LulzBot Mini is a bit of a special case. It actually has an auto-wiping pad down the back of the print bed there. You could have seen as it comes through. Sometimes you might need to change that out, but you'll know as it'll be all jammed up with filament. What we're going to do is go to this point. It's going to heat up, cool down the bed to a certain temperature, and then it's going to go through an auto-leveling sequence on the conductive pads. It's also going to clean the tip of the nozzle, make sure it's nice and clean so it can get a good first layer, and then it's going to print that rocktopus for us.

So what we're going to do is let that go ahead and print, and we're going to come back and take a look at some of the results of that print. So stay tuned, guys. We'll be back in a second with some cool-looking rocktopus prints.