In this era of consumer-grade FDM printers that have automatic bed levelling, automatic pressure advance tuning, automatic temperature regulation and so on buttoned away behind bullet-proof presets and automation, something as archaic as manual filament tuning does seem a bit out of place. Unless you’re running that hot rod Voron FDM printer, does it make sense to ‘waste time’ with manual tuning your off-the-shelf FDM printer? In a recent video [MandicReally] argues that it still makes sense to unlock more performance.Up front it’s made clear that these auto-tuned configurations are perfectly fine for the average user, who will be perfectly happy with something like a ‘generic PLA’ preset combined with whatever auto-configuration the printer did. That said, not every filament is the same, nor is each heating element, nozzle and feeding system. In that sense it can be worth it to take a deeper look.In the video basic aspects like preparing the material, such as properly drying, are looked at, before running through tests for temperature, flow ratio and rate, pressure advance, retraction speeds, material shrinkage etc. before doing a test between such a tuned profile versus a generic preset for ASA filament.Although the difference isn’t night and day, the tuned profile was faster due to less conservative settings and had better accuracy on the final print due to taking the target FDM printer’s performance into account. Even if not something that the average hobbyist would be interested in, if you’re doing something like production runs with FDM, this might be something you’d want to look at.The three different profiles used in the test. (Credit: MandicReally, YouTube)