Issue with Printing on Printrbot

ntonkin64 · 2017-12-09T16:52:33.000Z

Hello,

I have a Printrbot Metal Plus and I’ve been printing for just over a week. My print isn’t coming out as expected. It is like it is using a different model than what I have in Cura. I’m designing in Fusion 360. So what I’m trying to print is “Pic #1”. Everything goes as planned until I hit the area circled in blue on “Pic #1”. The printer slows way down and it seems to be printing some version of an older design. Even then when I printed the previous design it didn’t print that part of the design that slow.

printrbot_slow_print.png850×504 14.8 KB

Pic #2 shows what actual came out. I ended up stopping the print once I saw the problem for the 3rd time. You can see it looks like there are “prongs” or retention features from the previous design (See Pic #3 and Pic #4) that I have printed somehow showing up. I shutdown Cura and restarted, I created a whole separate file in Fusion and I’m still getting this issue. Another thing that is strange is that the printer speed when printing the “Prong” design was not nearly as slow and the “Cylinder” design. I didn’t change any settings.

Any idea on what is going on?

cylinder.png913×674 774 KB

prong_attempt.jpg1291×736 150 KB

prong_print.png1046×815 1 MB

mazerte · 2017-12-09T19:20:22.000Z

Hi did you check the layer preview mode in cura? I think you fix your model by adding a cylinder hover the center but the model keep the previous version inside the second with a thin wall.

Fistoldude · 2017-12-09T23:38:40.000Z

The material is too hot and do not have time to cold down, the easy change is print two at the same time. so it have more time to cold down.

ntonkin64 · 2017-12-10T17:56:55.000Z

So I ran some test prints on just the top cylinder part. There is a 5 second min print time per layer and not enough in that small space to print at the normal print settings. I increased the infill and decreased the time to 4.5 sec and it worked well.

ntonkin64 · 2017-12-10T17:58:14.000Z

Yes. The print just happened to look like the other model but it wasnt. Chance thing. Thanks for the help.

USCAN · 2017-12-10T23:09:55.000Z

I found that I got very mixed results when using cura on my Printrbot simple metal. I changed slicers and all of my problems went away. I changed to simplify 3D. I have to admit that the UI is a little better in Cura however.

To address your problem, can you post what the layer view looks like? It could be an issue of what you are printing is two small for your slicer settings.

It could also be an issue of the layer remaining in molten form and trying to print on top of a molten layer, which is bad (Fistoldude already pointed this out).

It could also be a retraction setting. If it is having to wait due to the layer time the area that its not printing could be “backlash” in the filament that it thinks its extruding but its actually not. To fix this you will want to play with the retraction length and speed in the machine settings. I recommend trying what printrbot recommends first then tuning it to your specific machine

Another thing you could try is printing some small parts where you force the layer time to be smaller than the min layer time and see what happens, you may need to adjust some settings to be able to print very small parts. if you look here and here it shows common issues and how to fix them.