A blue 3DBenchy is visible on a small circular plate extending up through a cutout in a flat, reflective surface. Above the Benchy is a roughly triangular metal 3D printer extruder, with a frost-covered ring around the nozzle. A label below the Benchy reads “2 MIN 03 SEC.”

Managing Temperatures For Ultrafast Benchy Printing

July 8, 2025 by Aaron Beckendorf 10 Comments

Commercial 3D printers keep getting faster and faster, but we can confidently say that none of them is nearly as fast as [Jan]’s Minuteman printer, so named for its goal of eventually printing a 3DBenchy in less than a minute. The Minuteman uses an air bearing as its print bed, feeds four streams of filament into one printhead for faster extrusion, and in [Jan]’s latest video, printed a Benchy in just over two minutes at much higher quality than previous two-minute Benchies.

[Jan] found that the biggest speed bottleneck was in cooling a layer quickly enough that it would solidify before the printer laid down the next layer. He was able to get his layer speed down to about 0.6-0.4 seconds per layer, but had trouble going beyond that. He was able to improve the quality of his prints, however, by varying the nozzle temperature throughout the print. For this he used [Salim BELAYEL]’s postprocessing script, which increases hotend temperature when volumetric flow rate is high, and decreases it when flow rate is low. This keeps the plastic coming out of the nozzle at an approximately constant temperature. With this, [Jan] could print quite good sub-four and sub-thee minute Benchies, with almost no print degradation from the five-minute version. [Jan] predicts that this will become a standard feature of slicers, and we have to agree that this could help even less speed-obsessed printers.

Now onto less generally-applicable optimizations: [Jan] still needed stronger cooling to get faster prints, so he designed a circular duct that directed a plane of compressed air horizontally toward the nozzle, in the manner of an air knife. This wasn’t quite enough, so he precooled his compressed air with dry ice. This made it both colder and denser, both of which made it a better coolant. The thermal gradient this produced in the print bed seemed to cause it to warp, making bed adhesion inconsistent. However, it did increase build quality, and [Jan]’s confident that he’s made the best two-minute Benchy yet.

If you’re curious about Minuteman’s motion system, we’ve previously looked at how that was built. Of course, it’s also possible to speed up prints by simply adding more extruders.

Tattoo Your 3D Prints With Velocity Painting

July 5, 2018 by Sonya Vasquez 9 Comments

Just when it seems like we’ve juiced all the creative potential out of our 3D printers, a bold new feature lands on the table. Enter Velocity Painting, a concept brought to life by [Mark Wheadon] that textures our 3D prints with greyscale images.

At its core, the technique is straightforward: skin an image onto a 3D print by varying the print speed in specific locations and, thereby, varying just how much plastic oozes out of the nozzle. While the concept seems simple, the result is stunning.

Velocity Painting opens up new ways of expression on top of an existing print with all the skinning opportunities. Imagine adding a texture for realism like this rook that’s been patterned with a brick layout, or imagine an aesthetic embellishment like the flames on [Mark’s] dragon print.

The results speak for themselves, and the growing number of users are proving it. Head on over to the gallery to indulge yourself in this delightful oozing aesthetic that’s sure to turn a few heads.

[Mark Wheadon’s] hack takes the mechanics of how we print and adds another creative tuning knob. If you’re looking for other embellishments for your prints, have a look at [David Shorey’s] work on texturizing fabrics.