Design for 3D-Printing

Great article. Unfortunately it seems that there is a lot of information out there about DFM for 3D printing but not much about the actual print process itself: temperatures, bed flatness, bed adhesives, nozzle size, etc. Does anyone have any suggestions or resources on the subject?

Are you asking about best practices? Or the theory behind the printing process? I think there is a ton of this actually, because when 3D printing became affordable, the community did a huge amount of experimentation to figure out how to make their $250 Ender reliable.

Stefan's CNC Kitchen is a good channel if you want to see experiments with things like temperatures and materials. https://www.cnckitchen.com/

Or you could look at the original RepRap research and how it's evolved. The MK4S+ is just a very refined version of the original bed slinging printers. There are also papers on slicer development. There has been a trend towards thicker nozzles as slicers have gotten better (eg using 0.6 by default instead of 0.4).

Otherwise advances in printer technology, particularly first layer calibration, have improved massively in the last few years. So things like bed flatness and adhesives are much less of an issue with auto-levelling/probing nozzles. Bear in mind Ultimaker has been doing it this way for years, but it became mainstream (cheap) more recently. Any of the major modern enclosed printers (Prusa Core/XL, Bambu) shouldn't have adhesion problems with standard filaments. It's also highly filament specific, though the really high end machines (Markforged) are reliable in my experience because they discourage any deviation from their recommended materials and print settings.

For example MarkForged - a $10000+ printer - shipped their desktop FDM machine with Elmer's purple glue. They said it worked best in their testing and it still works for me.