I’ve had my Bizer for 8 months now, and the first thing that jumps out at me is that your heatbed temps are crazy-high. The highest I ever go is 90°C, which I do for PETG-- read at the sensor, not ‘actual’ --and that’s served me well. As for the bed leveling, you might want to check that your bed is, in fact, flat. Mine was slightly concave, and that pretty much made up my mind on buying a piece of borosilicate glass to put on it. BEST DECISION EVER.
No more painter’s tape, no more kapton (Except the sheet I kept on the bare aluminium bed to protect the glass…which turned out to be totally unnecessary*…), no more hideous damned rafting and worrying about whether or not the print was going to irreparably fuse itself to it! Just the lightest coat of Elmer’s purple washable gluestick, and pretty much any material sticks.
* That bit about protecting the glass being unnecessary? Every several prints, when the gluestick film’s gotten too beat to just ‘touch up’ without it getting lumpy, I just shave it all off with a few good strokes of a razor blade, and re-apply. Not a scratch on the glass yet.
If you’re wondering the kind of output I’m getting…this is a pretty good example. A 0.20mm layer height print in PLA, with a standard 0.40mm nozzle and half-assed active cooling (A fan sitting next to the printer.) The grid it’s sitting on is 0.5" and the diameter of the miniature’s base is 44mm. (At the 200% print size) You can see a timelapse of the print here 1.
Thanks for the tips! Just to be sure - my HPB reads 40 at room temperature so I have to add 15 degrees to get it in the ballpark - I verified this with my thermometer so a true 90c is the hottest my bed goes (set to 130).
Yes, I have been using glass and just got some cut-to-size so I’m excited to try.
BTW - your sample print is nice however it looks like it has the 'bulging band" problem I’m battling
Yeah, mine reads 40°C at room temp, too. I just go with what the machine says and build my profiles using that, unless there’s a problem with a material that can’t be reconciled by simply adjusting up or down 5°C at a time. Because trying to mentally juggle my own temperature offsets just complicates things, especially when-- when I get additional printers --each printer will likely be different. (i.e. simpler to just remember that PETG prints best at what my printer says is 240°C/90°C than to try and remember that those’re actually such-and-such and what-have-you degrees.)
There’s some slight waviness from layer to layer, a lot of it is attributable to vibration; the machine shakes like crazy if I push the speed, I need to get it mounted on the shelf better…it was behaving so much nicer on the workbench. Though if you’re talking about the forehead area, that’s actually the model.
Yep, as the owner of a mini-mill and mini-lathe, I know all too well the importance of making sure the workbench is as solid as possible. Somehow when I first set up my printer it was perfect, but after I moved it from its shelf to the table for maintenance and then back, I couldn’t find the way I had it sitting where it was nice and rigid…
I’m going to print some new feet for the printer that solidly mount it directly to the rails of the shelf. (I design a lot of clip-on accessories for my wire shelving.) Hopefully that will take care of it. Because the shelves themselves don’t wobble at all.
Rigidity-- both in the machine itself, as well as its environment, i.e. what it’s sitting on --is of paramount importance to the accurate operation of machine tools, 3D printers, really anything with moving bits and bobs.
Hi - yes - I tied both - but focus on at temperature as well as differing thicknesses - ‘the paper just dragging’ with regular paper, cardstock and even tried eyeballing it.
It sounds like I’m aiming for good consistent ‘squash’ - but I’m finding the bed height to be very inconsistent / repeatable - or I’m doing something very, very wrong.
Also each the skein engine puts down a different layers - esp when using a raft.SLIC3R being lightest and MakerWare being very, very thick and RepG’s SF in between. MakerWare’s raft is way to heavy - I’d say it is almost 1mm high - but it does stick to the bed - but nozzle drags on subsequent layers and I can’t bear the bashing noise!!
Any thoughts on how you calibrate the extruder? I read in the Sailfish manual where you set the two ‘K’ values but the goal is very nuanced differences - I need to get in the ballpark before these kind of tweaks!
With Marlin you simply calibrate the steps/mm so extruding 100m filament puts out 100mm - with Sailfish there doesn’t seem to be a way. With Marlin the skein engine made somewhat of a difference but among these 3 skeining options the output is radically different but end result pretty bad…
It is all very strange to me. Wish I had bought & built a Marlin-based Delta - I would have been printing a long time ago!
Hello JP - so here’s the 20MM calibration cube showing the rear-most side - where my problem is!
This was done with PLA, RepG 033 & SF 50. It started at 200C but bumped down to 190C 1/2 way through. The HPB is plate glass with blue tape, set to 70 (~30C) so it’d stick. (HAVE to heat bed or PLA will not stick)
No matter what it is the same back edge seems to be over-extruded even with extruder temperature so low it ‘clicks’.
