The next stage, Stage 5: The review. This and the last stage, the finish, take place after printing the part is complete. Want to know a trade secret? When the machine stops and the part is ready, the real pros aren't done with printing, the real pros learned something from every print. It is with the review stage that they get the most value out of the part, not just for this project, but for tuning their process to produce parts like these in the future. I start with these three questions every time I review a part. Reviewing the plan. From a design perspective, was the right part produced? Reviewing the slice. From a job preparation perspective, was the part prepared correctly? Reviewing the part. From a hardware perspective, was a part produced correctly? If you grab your part after printing and don't take the time to inspect it and learn something about how successful the print or design was compared with your plan for it, then you're missing the majority of the value of 3D printing. At the end of the day, the greatest value of most 3D printed parts, particularly prototype parts, comes in the brief moments of inspecting and handling the resulting part and passing it around to other stakeholders. In fact, when prototyping a part to be produced with another manufacturing process, the review phase is even more important. The value of that part is fully expended in that initial review and inspection encounter. After design is validated as successful, 9 times out of 10, the printed part can be thrown in the recycler. If you aren't careful, the choice to not dispose of that part immediately or mark it clearly can have detrimental effects. The decisions represented by that part from slicing to small adjustments to feature placement can quickly become unclear and eventually impossible to guess. So it is worth making sure that your process of reviewing the part has at least enough consistency that you take down notes and mark that part so you can recognize the information associated with it later. In addition to going into more detail with this list, I have bundled into this lecture a number of other elements that I find helpful when reviewing parts. Reviewing the plan. First, reviewing the plan, was the right part produced? Forget how good or bad the fabrication of the object was and consider if this design solves the challenges set out for it. Under this topic, we have to subtopics: log the the parts, iterate part design. Log the parts. To do a good job of tracking the value of a printed part, you need to have a way to refer it to the various versions. Any team printing a lot of parts with many stakeholders will end up setting up some sort of log system. Unlike printing flat photos that you can flip over and annotate on the back, there aren't necessarily any free surfaces on your part to put notes on them. So how do you remember which iteration and print you are holding? Trust me, your lineup of prints along the edge of your desk will quickly become a mystery. The first time they take a tumble on the floor and you lose your ordering. Don't do that. I suggest you pick up a method for marketing your parts to help you keep them straight and then a digital solution for storing any information related to it. The most common methods I see operators use are these. One, marking on the object with a Sharpie or Scribe. Sharpies work great and if you can find a place flat enough to write on, you can actually get a lot of information on a printed part and indicate changes where you want to make them. Two, throwing the part in a plastic bag and labeling the bag. This works great for projects with lots of iteration. You can fill a box full of these bags and still have plenty of information about every part. Three, attaching a tag or a sticker. This is actually what I do. I add a tiny cheap eye bolt from a jewelry supply company and tie a hang tag on it that's just big enough to write a project name along with the date and time of print, then I throw any notes into a plain text log sheet on my computer. I used to use stickers, but they kept falling off. Four, putting the print in an individual box. To be honest, I've only seen operators use boxes for multiple parts, either marking on them with a Sharpie, throwing them in bags, or adding tags or stickers. I don't know anybody who has enough boxes for all the prints that they'll do. So now the digital considerations. There are a few easy housekeeping tricks you can follow while wrapping it for print job that will vastly raise the value of time that you've invested in your projects so far. The steps are simple. Create a simple plain text log file or spreadsheet and create a naming system for your projects and print jobs. Add any notes you observed during printing or while evaluating the part after the job somewhere so that you can locate it again. I tend to type out a date stamp at the head of a folder for each print job and then just dump a copy of the Cura project file which includes all the settings right into it. Anything I observed that will help me run the part better next time, I'll throw that into a text file in that folder and I'm done. While I have always envied those gorgeous lab notebooks where legitimate scientists or researchers tabulate their data, this simple file naming solution, Cura project file and plaintext note file, have helped me tweak my print settings more accurately than any more elaborate attempts at documentation that I have tried. Maybe your mileage will vary. I've seen some launch the camera on their phones, shoot a video around an object, and add any pertinent data about it via voice. That thing is pretty good. Another taped a legal pad to a box sleeve full of bags of parts to track what she was looking to improve across an entire collection of similar parts. That seemed to work great for her, too. The key thing is that right now, you might have a project opening Cura and a G-Code file on the machine. In a few moments, when you grab your part and go about your life, those files will lose any inherent data you might get out of them by logging and storing them. You want to match up your part to all of the digital training that led up to it. Iterate part design. When you see an opportunity to improve the part to bring it closer to your targets or to explore more promising route and can't afford the time to do so, you leap back to the stage you'd like to pick up the part again with the plan or the digital model. This is why you use this kind of technology. You should iterate your design. Reviewing the slice. Was the part prepared correctly? The two subtopics here are review the project file and iterate settings and profiles. Review the project file. From a software perspective, what was produced? How well did this match the slicer job settings? Take a look at the project file in your control software. Make changes, tune your settings. Iterates settings and profiles. Iterate your design or fabrication settings before running the design again. For the vast number of prototypes run on desktop 3D printers, the most important information can be gleaned first by handling the part, looking at the part, and testing the interface of that part to other real-world points of interface. Perhaps you will hand it to a colleague or client and then you'll throw it away. But you went to the trouble to produce it. Are you getting the maximum value out of it? There are some areas to consider: design; mechanical, that's the fit, the strength; color, right color for next time, photograph as well. These are a few of the considerations. Reviewing the part. Was the part produced correctly? The subtopics here are inspect the part, test and use the part, and part validation. Inspect the part. Early in the best practices lectures, we separated the design, software, and hardware perspectives as a means of breaking up the tasks and best practices into easy to digest elements. The inspection phase requires the intermingling of all three elements in one place and time. Part inspection. What factors am I looking at when inspecting a part? How can I compare a part to the plan for the part? What do I do with the part that fails inspection? What do I do with a part that passes inspection? What can I do about small cosmetic blemishes? Part validation. Validation, are reproducing the right product? Verification, are we producing the project right? Those are the two terms you often hear in industry around this topic. With the review stage complete, you will next move to the finish stage. However, it is worth mentioning here that even if you don't plan to do anything with the part after you've inspected it, there are some considerations for both delivering the part and sharing the design that you should think about as soon as you can after the review. If you completed the review stage successfully and scraped helpful information from inspecting the part, then you know now more than you ever will again about the part in how it relates to the digital design project and decisions you made in the 3D printer control software for slicing the job file. Take a moment and jot down notes to yourself at this stage that might be helpful to you when you hand off the part or share the digital assets. A handy rule of thumb is to imagine that someone hands this to you with no information. What would you want to know? What material was it made of? If there was a scale factor when printing the piece, what was it? What resolution settings were selected? We'll circle back to this topic in the lecture 4, the finish.
