Now, if you're an owner of a LulzBot 3D printer, this video might be particularly interesting to you. If you're just an interested person that has a 3D printer, it's going to be just as good, but not quite as relevant. So if you have a look at your printer up close and personal, you'll actually start noticing that a lot of these parts were 3D printed, and they were 3D printed by LulzBot on LulzBot machines. So imagine a LulzBot TAS 6 is just sitting somewhere out there pumping out parts for a TAS Mini. So we've got 3D printers printing 3D printers out there somewhere. Best thing about it is, because a lot of these parts are actually blended into the design, you can go ahead and print replacement parts in case your printer breaks down the track, making sure that you sort of future-proof yourself against things that commonly do break or wear down on your printer.

We already talked about how, especially on the tool head, these gears can sometimes wear down, and another part that often breaks is this idler latch here. So what I'm going to do is show you guys where you can find the 3D printed files, 3D printable files. Usually they come on an SD card or a USB card that comes with your printer, but if you've lost that or it's gone missing somewhere, it's fine. We can actually just jump onto LulzBot's website and grab those files there. Like I said before, the same goes with this 3D printer. Your printer may also have some 3D printed parts, and the best place to find out if it does is jump onto your printer manufacturer website and just have a poke around and see what they say about it.

So jumping onto the website download.lulzbot.com, which is this one here, you can see that we've just got pretty much a download server of all the different files, and we can see all the different models, the different parts, and we're particularly interested in the LulzBot Mini. But you can also see there's the Kit TAS, the A0100, all the way down to the TAS, we've got all the different models of TAS in there. So we're going to go ahead and select Mini, and I believe this is 1.02, 1.03, either way the tool head didn't change all that much. Now if we go in here we can see that there's a bunch of different files. You've got calibration files for printing to make sure that everything's calibrated right. You've also got some documentation, so you've got all your printer guides and everything in there. But we're not interested in that. We're interested in parts.

So we go to Production Parts, and then head into Printed Parts, and now you've got the full list of all the files that were printed to make up this LulzBot Mini. So I'm particularly interested in the Idler Block, which is this one here. So if I go Extruder Idler Block, go into this file, you can see there's a couple of files there, V1.4 and V1.4C. What we can do is we can click on that, download it, and open it straight into Cura, like I've gone ahead and done. And that's it there. So this part is a very likely part to break. What we see a lot of the time is it breaking along this line here, from where the pressure is being pressed in by the bolts on this side, and we can just see it getting a crack. A lot of the time people just grab some super glue or some glue that works with ABS plastics out and just glue that part back together. But why not print it? You've got a printer there. Why not print your own?

So usually we would see us printing these parts in ABS, because you want these pieces of plastic to be able to withstand the hotter temperatures. For example, if you're printing ABS, this tool head down the bottom here is going to be 240-degrees. ABS gets soft at 105, whereas PLA gets soft at about 60. So just to future proof this as much as possible, we'll go ahead and print with ABS if we were to print one. Or you could go ahead and grab some nylon or something that lasts at even higher temperatures. So we'll go into ABS profile, and we can just pick a standard profile. But what I will do is switch over to the full settings to change one thing. I want this part to be as solid as humanly possible. So usually I would go ahead and change my fill density up to 80% or more. So say 85% around that region makes this part ridiculously strong, and it's going to make sure that it doesn't break ever again.

So I'd go ahead and print that one out. I might whack a brim on it just to make sure that we don't get any warping with that ABS print, although it's quite a small part, so it should be fine. Yeah, so I'd go ahead and slice that one up and print it. Once it's printed, I could go ahead and replace it, or I could just have it sitting in my toolbox for one day later down the track. At the same time, another part that we do recommend, or not we recommend, but people do recommend that you print for the Mini would be the herringbone large and small gears. So they're the gears that we've already talked about that might wear down over time. Once they've worn down, it's not going to be very reliable to print with them. So you're better off having one up your sleeve now rather than later. So that's pretty much how easy it is to print replacement parts for your printer. There's also a bunch of different modifications and things that you can get from your printer's community for your particular printer. So it's always worth having a look at those and decking out your printer with some really cool gear.