Printers and Materials

9 min readUpdated Aug 2026

The editor can only design for a machine it knows about. The workbench is where you describe yours: the printers, the nozzles fitted to them, the quality presets you actually print at, and the filaments on the shelf. Everything the active setup chip offers, and every calibration you run, starts from a row you created here. Open it from Workbench in the site rail. It is behind a sign-in, so signed out that link takes you to the sign-in screen and returns you to the workbench afterwards.

The brand list is the first of three steps, and picking one preloads the defaults for that machine. Nothing here is guessed later.

Adding a printer

Add printer walks three steps: brand, model, then a review. The brand and model lists are real, generated from a slicer profile library rather than typed by hand, and every step has an Other escape with a free-text name if your machine is not in it.

Picking the exact model matters, because it is what preloads sensible starting values for the hardware you own.

The last step tells you what you are about to get: We'll add this printer with a default 0.4 mm nozzle and a Standard quality preset. You can calibrate it right after. That is exactly what happens, in one go, so a new printer is immediately usable as an active setup.

Nozzles

Add nozzle asks for a diameter and a hardware material.

The diameter is the single most consequential number in your whole setup, because it sets the width of every line the printer lays. A 0.4 mm nozzle draws lines about 0.4 mm wide, which is why a wall wants to be a whole number of those: 0.8 mm is two beads, 1.2 mm is three, and 1.0 mm is two beads plus a sliver of infill nobody wanted. The wizard puts it plainly: The bore sets your line width, detail and speed. 0.4 mm is the all-round default — go smaller for fine detail, larger for strength and speed.

The hardware choice is brass, hardened steel or ruby, and it is not cosmetic: The nozzle material decides which filaments it can survive without wearing out. Brass is fine for PLA, PETG and ABS. Anything filled with glass, carbon fibre or metal, and most glow-in-the-dark filament, will open a brass bore measurably within a spool, which quietly changes every dimension you calibrated. If you print abrasives, add the hardened nozzle as its own row rather than pretending it is the same nozzle.

Model each physical nozzle you swap between. They calibrate separately, and they should.

Quality presets

Add quality preset asks for a layer height and a name: Thinner layers look smoother but print slower. Pick a starting point — you can fine-tune it later.

On any FDM machine, layer height changes real dimensions and not only the finish. A hole printed at 0.3 mm layers is stepped more coarsely on its top and bottom than the same hole at 0.12 mm, which is why the clearance calibration asks you to match the layer height when you slice its test plate.

Name presets for the reason you would reach for them, as the wizard suggests with Give it a name you'll recognise in the setup selector. and its example e.g. Strong & fast. Months from now you will pick from this list in the Active Setup chip at the top right of the editor header, which opens a popover of four columns; this is the Quality one.

Materials

Add material asks for a brand, a polymer type and a colour, and materials are global rather than tied to a printer: one PETG row serves every machine you own.

Type is the field that carries meaning: The polymer family drives temperatures, cooling and how it behaves. Pick the closest match. Colour is honest about being decoration, This only affects how it looks in your library, though in practice a heavy pigment load can change how a filament flows, which is one more argument for a separate row when you notice a difference.

Add a row per filament you actually calibrate against, not one per spool. In practice two rolls of the same brand and type behave closely enough to share a calibration; PLA and PETG do not.

There is a cost to adding one anyway. A calibration run is recorded against all four slots of the active setup at once, so a new material you then select takes you off the exact match even though the printer, nozzle and quality have not moved. The reason line changes from This exact setup is fully calibrated. to Interpolated per constant from your other sets — limited by: and the number drops. Nothing is lost: the old run comes back the moment you select the material it was measured with.

The calibration score

The dashboard scores every category out of 10, with one decimal, next to a five-segment meter that fills left to right and takes the colour of its band: red below 4, orange below 6, amber below 8, green at 8 and above. Overall calibration is The average of every category score for the exact printer, material, nozzle and quality you have selected above.

Two categories exist, and their descriptions say what each is for:

Clearances: How accurately holes, pockets and fits print at their modelled size — the dimensional tolerance you get from this setup.
Printability: How cleanly this setup lays plastic: overhangs, bridging, stringing and overall surface quality.

A setup you have never calibrated scores 1.0, not 0. The score is a confidence percentage divided by ten, and market-standard defaults are always worth something, so the floor is one. Read 1.0 as "nothing measured here".

How a calibration carries across

You do not have to calibrate every combination you own.

Each constant is resolved on its own. For each one, the app looks at every calibrated run on the same printer and takes the value from whichever run carries over with the highest confidence, with the market default always available as a weak candidate. A category's score is then the worst of its constants, not the average, so one poorly transferred constant caps the whole category.

Confidence depends on what differs. Changing the material costs a slide fit little, since the gap you need to move freely is mostly geometry. Changing the nozzle costs hole compensation a great deal, because a different bore lays a different bead and the walls land somewhere else. Differences multiply: change the nozzle and the material and you keep the product of the two, which is why a distant setup ends up near the floor.

Two consequences for how you spend your time:

A different printer transfers nothing at all. Runs are filtered to the active printer before anything else happens. Every machine needs its own first calibration.
Calibrate the setup you print with most, and let the neighbours inherit. A second nozzle diameter is the change that benefits most from its own run.

The reason line under each score tells you which case you are in: This exact setup is fully calibrated., Interpolated per constant from your other sets — limited by:, Estimated from your nearest calibration:, or No calibration to fall back on — using market-standard values.

Recent calibrations lists your latest runs, and each printer, nozzle, quality and material carries its own count and the date of its last run, or Never calibrated.

Deleting

Delete asks for confirmation and warns about the collateral damage. For a printer: This can't be undone. Its nozzles and quality presets go with it, and any calibrations recorded for them are lost too.

Take that at face value. Deleting a printer takes its calibration history out of the scores, so a machine you delete and re-add starts from market defaults with the coupons still sitting on your desk. Deleting something that is part of your active setup empties that slot rather than blocking you, which leaves you on a partial setup and, until you fill it, unable to calibrate.

When it fails

The chip in the editor offers no materials. Materials are global but they still have to exist. No materials yet means add one.

The nozzle or quality column says Pick a printer first. Both belong to a printer, so nothing is offered until one is selected.

Calibrate opens a page that will not start. The button itself is never disabled: it always navigates. The refusal is on the page it opens, which needs a complete active set of printer, material, nozzle and quality and shows a gate message instead of the wizard until it has one. Fill the empty slot on the dashboard and go back.

Every score sits at 1.0 across the board. Nothing has been calibrated for this printer. That is the starting state, and Calibrating Your Printer is the way out of it.