I have been 3d printing for a very short time, but I've already learned some stuff I wish I'd known earlier, and I'm going to write about it here now - both to benefit someone else who's just starting, and because I think it will be interesting to look back later and see how much I was or wasn't on the mark.
- It's easy to print things, it's hard to print well
Most modern printers, even cheap ones, have a very simple out-of-box experience. My Flashforge AD5M was super cheap (I paid $211 plus tax and fees) and needed only to have the screen, PTFE tube, and spool holder attached, and the calibrations run automatically, before it could print the onboard calibration test files with the included filament. A very attractive speed benchy came out in less than 15 minutes, as was the custom at the time.
That's all well and good, and quite enjoyable really, but when it came time to print a drag chain to use with the enclosure kit with filament I sourced myself, I went through a lot of different designs and materials and revisions before I got something I could be happy with. Designing your own parts is yet another major step, with its own attendant complexity I'm only just getting into. (More on that later) - You don't need an enclosure to print a ton of stuff
I was going to do an enclosure regardless for noise reasons, but you have access to many materials without one, and in fact you have to leave it open in order to print PLA and other relatively low-temperature materials. Even if you do make an enclosure, you might not need to put the lid on it. Surrounding the printer is beneficial in drafty spaces, but you'll just have to take it off for PLA, and it typically means you need either a drag chain or a very tall enclosure. - Calibrate! Calibrate! Calibrate!
If finished and usable (or salable) products are the bread and butter, then calibration is the meat and potatoes of 3d printing. At minimum you will need to calibrate temperature, flow rate, and pressure advance. For maximum quality you will need to do this for each speed at which you want to print. The slicer of your choice has calibration routines, and you should use them, in order. Then do a Z-offset calibration. - Use the manufacturer's settings profiles as your baseline
Even when you're calibrating, you have to start somewhere. Why not start with settings which the manufacturer thinks are good? Despite marketing materials' insistence otherwise, most filament is fundamentally similar. Every filament maker can cheaply analyze another's products to determine what they're made of. You should still be calibrating even with the manufacturer's filament, so start with their settings rather than a generic profile, just pick the one that makes the most sense. - Degreaser is the best plate cleaner
I have nothing against soap and water, and very little against alcohol, but if you want to clean a bed plate then you want to use a degreaser. This is essentially what people are trying to accomplish with soap, but... why? Hop on down to the dollar store and buy whatever the cheapest and most inoffensive degreaser they have is - where I live, it's "LA's Totally Awesome!" all-purpose cleaner, which is still a dollar even at the increasingly inaccurately named Dollar General discount retail chain.
I will also tell you that before I figured that out, which took an embarrasingly long time considering I've studied auto body and paint, I used non-chlorinated brake cleaner to clean a textured PEI plate. In California this is almost pure acetone, and it was very effective and did not harm the plate. Your mileage may vary there, so don't say I said it would be OK, but plates are cheap... - Yes, you need a dryer
If you live where it's dry, and you always buy filament from the most reputable sources known for shipping dry filament, and you are lucky, then perhaps you will never actually need a dryer. If any of those things fails to be true at any time, you will need one. Even filament which seems like it's printing fine might print better after drying. I built a 400W 3-spool dryer using a small, broken microwave, and about thirty dollars in parts. If you are a casual user, a simple single-spool dryer might best serve your needs. - Interesting stuff prints slow
Take this how you want, it's true. Fine details, slow. Clear "transparent" prints, slow. Weird kinds of filament, usually slow. Maximum strength is slow, maximum surface quality is slow. Higher quality is just slower. It's super cool that modern printers can squirt out filament while traveling 600mm/sec, but will it adhere? Will it lay down flat? Sometimes you will just need to print slowly. - Printing slower means printing cooler
I feel like this should have been more obvious to me, but it wasn't. If you're not printing fast, then you probably don't need to be at the top end of the temperature range for the material you're printing. But you will know, because you're going to do tests at different temperatures, right?
If you have a snazzy printer you probably don't need to know any of that to start to print things successfully if you use official filament and the official slicer, except that you need to do calibrations. But you will need to know all of it eventually, and then some.