3DBenchy
3DBenchy is a 3D Printing torture test, it features many difficult points for a 3D Printer to print and provides a very good look at not just the print quality but also the quality of the filament used. Benchy has become somewhat of a celebrity in the world of 3D Printing and can be found to download for yourself here.
The bottom of the print is the first layer, and we can see here that it has done a good job of merging the material but has made it so the text on the bottom, that is supposed to say “CT3D.xyz”, is hard to read.
The other bit of text on Benchy reads “3DBenchy” and is supposed to be inlayed on a small plate that overhangs the rest of the model but here it is entirely unreadable and looks like a bit of a mess.
On the side of Benchy we see a fair bit of inconsistency in the layers; there is a few areas in which the material has come away from where it should be and has caused it to be misshapen.
At the front of Benchy is a large unsupported overhang, within this area we notice less of the layering issues we did on the side of the model and the end results are pretty good but just not particularly smooth.
When we reach the cabin section of the model we see more hard scenarios for a 3D printer, this one is a combination of unsupported overhanging and bridging gaps. The unsupported overhanging did fairly well up until it reached the point at which it needed to bridge the gap, where it did successfully bridge that gap but with an excess of material at the top, this can be a result of the material not cooling fast enough and starting to fall before it becomes rigid again. The material not cooling fast enough could be one of two factors, one is that the printer isn’t cooling the part enough and the second is that the material is being printed at a higher temperature than it should be.
We’ll skip the rest of the cabin for now so we can look at the chimney on Benchy. At this point in the print the printer is going around a very small area repeatedly, not giving the material much time to cool away from the hot end of the printer. As a result of this cooling we can see that the layers start to sag on the edges and at one point the layers are much wider than the others, but overall the results are fairly impressive.
Back to the cabin of Benchy, the arching here sees the same issue that the circle did but with a little bit of stringing between the bridged point.
The rest of the arch has a lot of stringing, this is a sign of the material being printed at a higher temperature than it should be, but we used the included profile for this printer and the included 10 meters of filament, so the included profile may need tweaking, or maybe the material included in the box is just very low quality.
The overhang on this window is particularly difficult, it has no support and is a straight bridge, there is no gradual increase in overhang so it has to go straight from one point to the other without dripping off. We can see that the printer does manage it but the results are less than ideal; there is a small drip of excess material at the bottom but once a first layer has been established the printer manages to build upon this a create a cleaner look.
At the bottom of the window, we see more stringing and excess material being left behind in places. Overall this area is clean and the string and excess here can be easily removed.
