Sometimes change is imposed upon us (make that “Often change is …”). Anyway, sometimes (often?) that change is good, and that’s the case with how I now am changing my filament on my Cerberus 3D Gigante 3D printer.

Last month, the teeth on the Gigante’s extruder motor got stripped, which required me to order a new extruder. That actually worked out well – I was between one of my own prints, Redhead, and beginning a 3D printed commissioned sculpture.

When I got the new extruder, I discovered I could just pause the print to change the filament instead of having to do it on the fly, the way I had been doing it:

The old way worked amazingly well, but it added some stress to the process. I had to get the new filament to feed through smoothly while the printer was running, as you can see in the video above.

Now the process is positively civilized. As you’ll see in the video below, now I can simply pause the print, move the printhead out of the way, and feed in the new filament:

I don’t even have to remember where I moved the head to – Repetier, my host program, remembers where I was and goes right back to that spot when I’m ready to resume printing.

I show you how to change the filament as well as a few little tricks, step-by-step, in the video.

Honestly, there’s enough stress making sure the print is adhered to the print tray, that the flow and heat are set right for the form, that I’m not going to simply run out of filament, so removing concerns about making a filament change sure works for me ….