Suggestions to improve print times in the LMG 3d printer farm

[nbestauros]

Hey LMG, im sure you guys have probably had lots of convo's with prusa himself and a bunch of other makers about these kinds of things, so im hoping not to be an extra voice yelling in your ears.
Currently I dug my prusa i3 mk2s out of retirement in order to assist my local washington state hospitals with a group of other makers, but that's beside the point.

We are currently 3d printing lots of face mask clips:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4227132/files
 

As one of our bottlenecks was number of printers in our group, (one of our teammates has about 6-7 makerbot 3d printers but they are unbearably slow), i decided to try and speed up my own printer.

I decided to install a .8mm nozzle instead of the .4mm nozzle that comes default on prusa 3d printers. This means that potentially 4x the material can come through the nozzle, but in practice, it usually halves the 3d printing time.

I would recommend picking up a few .6mm nozzles to play with them, as the prusa slicer software comes preinstalled with profiles for .6mm printing, while i had to tinker with my printer to make a .8mm profile successful.

 

The installation of a new nozzle takes under five minutes and a genuine e3d brass nozzle is $5 and there are tons of knock offs which perform virtually the same available for much cheaper.

 

Some great documentation about nozzle sizes in fdm 3d printing:
http://projects.ttlexceeded.com/3dprinting_nozzle_sizes.html

Here is a prusa video explaining pros and cons of nozzle sizes: 

Here is a video explaining how to replace a nozzle on a prusa:

 

I read through the general forum rules, and i didnt find another section in the forum to comment on videos like this. Apologies if this breaks a forum rule that i missed or if this is in the wrong section of the forum.

[nbestauros]

Also a question to the 3d printing community: Where are you finding cheap pla or petg filament right now? My source from matterhackers at $16 per roll in bulk is out of stock. Anyone else have a ~$17 cost per kg source of filament? Its not the end of the world if i have to spend $22 (which seems to be the going rate for in stock kg of filament right now), but i cant find any cheaper than that.

[SansVarnic]

-= Moved to Hobby Electronics =-

 

@LinusTech

[ColinLTT]

Hey All,

 

Appreciate the information - I'm well aware that bigger nozzles and modified settings can increase print speed - the print farm has shifted to other designs and materials a couple times now since the completion of filming, and it's a constant game of optimization. The current demand for my time right now is moving the print farm into shelving units to vertically stack them, as well as laser cutting new spool racks to handle the 2.3kg spools of PLA we're bringing in from Mitsubishi Chemicals (375kg of filament coming in). We ended up shipping approx 850 sets of the prusa face shield design to Inksmith, but we're currently printing Ear-Savers by the thousands. 

 

We intend on pivoting to helping Tinkerine (local educational 3D printer manufacturer) to produce their design of a face shield soon, as they have received their medical device certification. Once we have verified the plan is up to our standards we will be printing parts for that. That certification goes a long, long way to getting these shields into the hands of the medical professionals that need them safely and efficiently.

 

We are constantly evaluating where we can help the most and doing our best to be helping as effectively as possible, in whatever way we can. 

 

 

[nbestauros]

That's awesome to hear, inspiring work you guys are doing.