Hello everyone. My name is Arden and I am brand new on the forum. Anyways. I have been having issues with my printer and would like to resolve them. Here’s a picture of my latest print. It’s really annoying! I just want the layers to be nearly perfect. I have tightened all of the belt’s, added a glass bed, and have allowed the z axis rod to “float” via removal of the top bearing. I can’t see why this would be happenon. Any ideas?
It doesn’t look too bad, turn down your plastic flow a bit.
Hard to tell what you’re issues are with that low quality pictures. I’m guessing blobs and zits? May need to adjust your retraction and coast settings.I recommend checking out this guide, helpful even if you don’t use Simplify3d:
https://www.simplify3d.com/support/print-quality-troubleshooting/
Jason is right. If you are using Simplify 3D or Cura you can calibrate and adjust the e-steps. If you are using the Makerbot or flashprint it only allows for flow rate adjustments. Download or create a 20mm cube stl, then use calipers and algebra to calculate the right flow the first time. If your cube is good and you still get zits … it may be a retraction setting that needs adjustment.
More info. What slicer, material, speeds and temps?
NickR
6
It looks like your walls are overextruding to me… you could try turning down your extrusion % and adjust retract settings… sometimes with pla to prevent any blobs or stringing at the end of the loop I will add 4.5mm of retraction. Also coasting at the end of a loop helps if your material is ozzing post extrusion. It’s hard to see what you mean by layers not lining up from your picture though.
You should be able to click on the picture for fullscreen. Basically my problem is that when the print head moves from the waving arm to the body of the octopus it makes a blob which then creates a layer which is thicker. This makes the layers uneven. I have been playing around with retraction and coasting with some degree of improvement however the issue is still there. I will have to calibrate my extruder step’s. Do I need a caliper for adjustment?
Simplify3d, pla, 60mms, have tried at 210 200 and 190 also at speeds of 30mms.
Click on the De Blobber option.
Ok, keep the temp about 200 or less probably and keep speeds down while figuring it out. Probably 30-4-mm/sec.
Starting retraction at 1.2mm and 30mm/sec.
Also start with a .2 layer height to get things setup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0iPkyJT2dM
Not an entertaining video. But I like it because it is super straight forward… In short you will need calipers, a marker, and software that extrudes in mm i.e. “Ponterface”
What software has the “De Blobber” option?
I have calibrated the extruder using Dr lex 100mm ffcp code. I did this three times and it came out to an average of about 90mm instead of 100. So now in s3d I simply changed the extrusion multiplier to 1.11. I have read printed the octopus however is am getting the same issue. So now I just have to work on retraction.
Aside from a few hicups at the bottom of the cube it printed just fine. I even increated the speed to 90mms during this print half way through! I measured the cube with my calipers and it is pretty darn close to 20mm. 19.99mm and 20.06mm. Yet still on other prints (included the octopus) I get terrible uneven layers from retraction issues. I have mucked around to no avail. No idea what to do.
Update. I have found what is causing most of the issue. I set my infill to 100 on the same print and I got none of the funky looking uneven layers. Just tiny zits from too much retraction. The question is… how do I fix this. The infill seems to be the problem.
Constantly printing at 100% infill is pretty wasteful. I would set the infill to 15% to 20%. Print with 3 shells (if using a 0.4mm nozzle shell thickness will be 1.2mm) and infill to shell overlap to 10-15%. If your slicer printing the infill first then the shells try to configure it to do the shells first then the infill second… or vice versa.
1.11 is kind of excessive for PLA. I might back it off .05 at a time until you see a change. Doing the calibration cube is going to be a good method of getting a start point. I run about .95-.97 on mine and it seems pretty good. Measuring the filament diameter is essential though.
Looks pretty good what extrusion multiplier? 90 is really fast though!
Did you do a solid calibration cube and look for the issues? Such as the top bulging or being concave?
Run the cube as is in the Sailfish instructions. You will probably end up with an extrusion multiplier around .9-1.0
Another thing to try since you have been changing a lot of stuff is to reset S3D from the help menu and reload the Flashforge Creator Pro printer profile. Sometimes things get messed up.
If it is still problematic then tell me what STL you are having trouble with and I will try it. If it works good I can send you the x3g file to try and see.
Provy
20
Thanks wirlybird.
A very useful link for me.
