 So you just got your first 3D printer, you got the bed leveled, and now it's time to load your filament so you can print. We're gonna learn that today. My name's Jim and this is the Edge of Tech. So a lot of people have issues with 3D printers and loading the filament, especially with the Creole machines and that plastic extruder. It can be a little bit tricky and I'm gonna walk you through today how I load my filament and it usually only takes me a couple seconds or so. With that being said, we need to talk a little bit about how to handle your filament. It is very important that this end, the loose end here, never ever becomes loose and just flies around because that can cause knots and it can cause all sorts of trouble for your prints. So what we need to do, right now I have it run through the two holes in the spool here, but I'm gonna show you the proper way to handle filament and then we're gonna get it on this machine and get it loaded. Whenever you get a new roll or you have a roll that's set up like this where you kinda push it through the holes in the side, either way, you need to make sure that that end never goes rogue. It never lets go and never gets out of your hand. It either needs to be in here or in your hand. So I'm gonna push this through a little bit and I'm gonna hold the end of this and no matter what, I'm gonna hold this thing like my print depended on it really because it does. If you let this thing go and it uncoils and everything, then you gotta pull it out and recoil it up and make sure you don't have any knots and that takes a little while. So you always wanna make sure you're holding on to the end of the filament. That way it doesn't go loose. So it either should be in your hand, in the printer, or in the side little holes in the spool, or if you have little filament clips that works too, but you never wanna let that go. Now the only tool we're gonna need to load the filament is actually the snips or the nippers or whatever you wanna call them that came with your 3D printer. We're gonna use that to cut an angle in your filament later and that's gonna help us out. Let's do it. So the first thing you wanna do is heat up your printer. Now mine's already at 205, but I'm gonna show you how to do this. You wanna scroll over to control. You wanna go down to temperature and you wanna go to nozzle temp and bring that up to whatever temperature you want. In my case, we'll use 205. If you're gonna print right after this, you can always bring your bed up as well. So you could select this and bring this up to whatever you want. The other way to bring this up quick is just to go back to prepare, scroll down the preheat PLA, and that will set everything at 200 on the nozzle and 60 on the bed. But for loading filament, you don't need the bed heated, you just need your nozzle heated. Now what you wanna do is grab the end of your filament and bring it out and take the snippers that came with your kit and just cut a very nice angle right into the end of your filament. So if you can see the end of that, it's very angled now. From there, we bring the filament around. We push it into the hole here. It's very important that it goes between our gear and our pulley. So we'll squeeze the arm just a little bit to get it right in there. And if you just squeeze it a few times like that, a lot of times it'll go right in. Now something that you wanna make sure, you wanna make sure this is straight. It will not go in if this is hooked or bent or anything like that. So make sure it's straight, push it straight in, then push it all the way in till you get to that hot end. Now you'll know it reaches the hot end because when you're pushing the filament will start oozing out. Just like that. And that's it, your filament is now loaded. All right, we did it. We successfully loaded our filament into our 3D printer. I hope the tip about cutting the end at an angle and making sure it's straight helps you out a lot. This can be finicky, especially when you're first doing it for the first time. After a couple of times, you'll be a pro. Now I do wanna point out that I pushed the filament all the way down so it's oozing out the hot end. And I do that for two reasons. Number one, I know the filament's all the way down into the nozzle. Number two, it flushes any of the old colors out. Now I do this every time I load filament. I always push it through until the old color gets flushed out. That way, when you start your print, that old color's gone, it's all the new color. Now, a quick tip also about unloading your filament. How I unload my filament is I heat up the hot end, I push the filament through maybe five to 10 millimeters just enough so it starts oozing. And then I pull it back through the tube. And that will definitely help you out. It'll help get the filament out of the tube a lot easier and you won't see those globs on the end. That makes it hard to pull it back through the tube. It's actually called purging and some printers actually do that automatically. And some people actually add it to their G-Codes so they don't have to worry about it later. Well, I hope you guys learned something today. And as always, keep printing. Hey everybody, I hope you guys liked the video today. Give me that thumbs up if you did. Hit that subscribe button right here if you wanna join the channel and the bell if you wanna get notified anytime we go live on Monday night for hot makes or anytime another great video comes out like this. Check out the rest of the playlist right here.