Hello,
When you get a 3D printer and are working on getting it setup one of the first things you print is a little tugboat thing called a Benchy - I assume after the word benchmark. It is a good indicator of how well your printer is assembled and adjusted.
My question is there something similar in the CNC Plasma world?
Regards,
Jerry
Can’t say it is “of the CNC world” but on FireShare, this seems to be it:
It is a bottle opener!
Another one:
Yeah, everyone seems to make some sort of bottle opener.
I however have never printed a benhcy…ever. I prefer to hit the ground running. I did one pre-sliced file on my old Ender 5, but my BambuLab went straight to work.
Same with my Crosfire Pro - went straight to work making a bracket for one of our pavers.
Same here. Never have I done a bottle opener. But “straight to work”…well sorta…I made a bracket for holding my laser lights on the torch. It was way beyond my camming skills at the time and the results show!! 
The bottle opener exercise would not have helped: tiny holes and tiny slots. Looked good in Fusion but not so good on the metal. Turned out one of my couplers was slipping. Didn’t figure out that problem until the entire lead screw fell off the motor shaft.
Benchy is cool and everything, but doesn’t tell you anything about your printer / filament except “it prints” or “it doesn’t”.
Temp ladders / stringing tests (filament performance), single extrusion wall cubes (XY accuracy, acceleration, ringing), and single layer thick squares in different areas of the bed (flatness and parallelism) are far more informative of whether your printer is in good shape or not.
I’ve gone thru at least 20 kg of filament in the last 3 or 4 months and not one Benchy.
Agree about what the Benchy actually accomplishes. I just spent 2 hours trying to figure out how to print with a cheap TPU filament from Giantarm using a retraction test sample. To print a Benchy would have been a total waste of filament and time.
Waste of time benchy on a Bambu Lab…20 minutes?
Hey Jerry,
Others have mentioned it, but cutting a bottle opener definitely feels like a rite of passage in the plasma cutting community. I’ve even seen plasma cut bottle openers handed out at weddings and baby showers!
