yellowshark

Nice job . I know it is not very thick but just how thick is it? What technique did you use for getting the images on the surface? On my list of R&D todos is to try out Repetier's Velocity painting. Lol I am just about to start printing some discs for levelling my vinyl record deck; I shall be going to the giddy heights of 0.5mm, or less.

No reason why you cannot use .06mm; I suspect you would not want to go above 190 but I have little experience at that thinness. Also I have no understanding on whether really thin layers have any impact on stringing

Lol you young'uns and your health a safety. I come from a generation where we used to clean out our billy cans with a clump of grass and attached earth, a quick swill out with water then cook our stew. I have been testing this for over 4 years now and can guarantee that as long as you keep your bed temp below 500 your printer will not burst into flames. I spray and print with windows closed to maintain consistent ambient temp. and pleased to say I passed my last medical.

Ooh yes yeugh. Try any or all of all print speeds set to 30mm/s (1st layer 20mm/s) Fan 100% extruder temp; with layer height of .300 the probably no higher than 200 - cooler if layers are thinner; assuming a .4 nozzle then line width .4 and wall size a multiple of .4 I assume you are not using spiralise.

You do not say what 1st layer speed you are using but you want 20mm/s for those circles and as @gr5 says an easy solution is to move the nozzle closer to the bed. If all else fails then you could design your part for the circles to start on layer 2 and then when finished cut out the 1st layer with a Stanley knife. Oh and to make things easy for adhesion print your 1st layer at 0.300 layer height

Well I suspect that is how it works, i.e. if you are printing 4 copies one at a time then there will be 4 copies of almost the same code, to print a copy, following each other except that the x/y axis positions will be different but the extrusion amount will be the same for each line of code. But apart from having to do work on the user interface, in the background you then have to deal with issue of different copies having different heights and avoiding collisions during printing etc.

Well you are certainly not printing too cold! This differs from printer to printer so treat this ONLY as a guide but I would print .200 at 30 or 40mm/s at 200 and I printed .300 at 60mm/s at 210 - maybe cooler but I printed at 60mm/s, after 4 years, for the 1st time last week and it was fine. To note; if important you will get normally better surface finish if you set your 4 print velocities to the same speed. Each time you change speed you will get a pressure change in the extrusion system which takes time to equalise and can result in artefacts being deposited on the surface. The only time I have a difference is if I have a piece with a large surface area and printing infill at a slow speed would be tortuous. In which case I will print at least 3 walls (possibly overkill), walls before extrusion and inner walls before outer wall; the goal being to let the inner walls take the impact of any artefacts when slowing infill speed down to wall speed. Sorry I digress; thanks for the detailed response. @geert_2 point is a good one, I had not thought of that. It is possible, as you say, that you had some faulty filament there but have now gone past that and are back to good filament - that has happened to me, although subsequently I did hit bad filament again on the reel. So perhaps not likely but certainly possible. From what you say (apart from checking the fan) everything looks good; I think I would proceed as follows 1. do several atomic pulls, doing several is important because doing one and finding it clean does not mean that everything has been dislodged. 2. If you know how/are comfortable with it, then remove your extruder and take the nozzle off and check inside the extruder to make sure there is nothing deposited on the inner wall of the shaft. 3. Run the printer for several hours using your other filament. 4. Cross your fingers and try the red again. 5. send us a smile or update us on the problem.

It would be helpful if we knew you layer height, print speed and extruder temp. Is all your PLA from the same supplier, if so who; if not where did the red PLA come from. I read your commets as saying that for all your other filament everything is OK - it is just the red filament. You are suffering bad under extrusion. Your 2nd pic shows the result of your drive wheel trying to feed the filament through the Bowden tube but the filament is sticking and the wheel teeth are grinding down the filament. I am not sure about pics 3 & 4; is the thickening causing the sticking or is it caused by the sticking I wonder? So what is happening? Well it as all other PLAs are working it is safe to say, I think, that your drive system is fine. Also that you have no material stuck inside the nozzle; but with the problem you are experiencing it is always a good idea to do a few atomic pulls to make sure the nozzle is clear. To me it seems that either your red filament is faulty (i.e. not a consistent width and being fat in some places which is causing the sticking) - which is why it be helpful to know your filament manufacturer(s), or you at printing it too cold. All filaments, even if from the same manufacturer, are different and it may be that their optimum settings will differ but normally you should be able to print different colours with the same settings - this is why knowing your settings would be helpful, you may just be on the edge and the red is pushing you over it - probably unlikely but we do not know without the info. My guess at the moment based on your info above is faulty filament. Can you measure your filament diameter, back from the drive unit towards the reel for a metre or two, say 10+ measurements. It should be 2.85mm +/- 0.05mm; anything 2.95 and above is suspicious.

Well it is good that your ID is smaller than specified; that is to be expected and .400mm may be par for the course, as I said I measured .190mm error which I thought was good! In your first post you said you were 0.015" oversized which really confused me. Be careful measuring at the bottom as the bottom layer tends to be squashed down for adhesion and will be larger than specified. How much depends on your machine setup, bed to nozzle distance, but I tend to have my distance quite small so it is always fatter at the bottom. If dimensional accuracy at that location of the part is important I will either back off and risk adhesion for a gain in accuracy or leave it as is and start filing. Bottom line is, in my view, that with a nice shiny new machine you should be able to get a lot better than 0.250mm (0.010") accuracy. If I cannot deliver 0.050mm or better I am not happy! (and I will engineer IDs to get that) my 3ntr printer is 4.5 yrs old. I will try and play with a variety of walls over the weekend and let you know what I find.

Lol, I am definitely not having a good week; after all the calibration work, last night I got 2 hours into the print and it stopped extruding! Anyway it was worth it, I ran it again this morning and the results were... Using two 0.4 walls at 30mm/s and 0.2 layer with 100% fan OD - target 57.15mm aborted run 57.15mm 2nd run 57.17mm ID - target 47.04mm 2nd run 46.85mm (1.844") So the ID as expected, in fact very good; I work on an error in the range of .2mm to .4mm for IDs so 0.19mm is probably the best I have seen. Struggling with the cube in Cura15.04 so I will go back to 2.7 ( I went back to 15.04 Wed night to see if my dimensional errors were being caused by 2.7) So for whatever reason I am not experiencing your problem (using circular geometry in my test). I.E. With multiple walls OD is perfect and ID as expected is smaller. I will go through your posts again and see if I can think of anything that could be causing your problem.

Comparing the two images then in your original image the right hand pointy bit looks screwed too; assuming the version of the model is the same.

Thanks for that, I was out by a factor of 10, so it looks a lot better now! I just have nozzle to bed distance to optimise now but the football starts around 7:30 so I may struggle to get your piece done tonight. What is the dim. of the "larger inner diameter"?

So, diameter of the hole is approx. 0.5mm? Cannot help thinking I have translated your scaling factor incorrectly but maybe the hole is really small. I may be misreading you but to me you are saying in your 1st para that the hole has an ID 0.015" larger than the dimension (never heard of that before) but then later you talk about modelling the part with 0.015" larger hole. Interesting post, which is why I wanted to try your model and see what I get - never printed a model with a single wall so you could be right! Have you checked the calibration of your nozzle? Your post prompted me to recalibrate and my 0.4 nozzle is pushing out 0.45mm width

....I wanted to see what OD Cura was stating

Something not quite right somewhere; I loaded your stl and it is coming into Cura (2.7) with an OD of 2.2mm, which from the picture clearly is wrong.

Yes it is. I do not think there is a simple "cut" command but you can sink the model below the build plate and print the top half and then rotate the model 180 and sink it again and print the bottom half. There will be free software out there which will cut the model in two before you get to Cura; not something I have done but probably Meshmixer or Netfabb, no doubt others too.

Not sure I understand why you have your flow setting at 180% instead of 100% or very close. Maybe you are compensating for something else that is wrong?

If I am reading you correctly then what you describe is normal, minor differences depending on printer/firmware. Depending on how well your printer is setup, one of two things will happen; either the filament will immediately stick to the bed or it will not, in which case you will drag some filament along the bed before it does stick. It is advisable to print with either a brim or a skirt, which does two important things. Firstly it will keep the string of extruded filament away from you model; secondly this allows the pressure to equalise before it starts printing your model.

Following on from @gr5 my first question is, comparing the two prints, did you use EXACTLY the same settings for both prints, i.e. printer speeds, layer height, extruder temp., fans. Are you using PLA? Am I right in assuming that both prints are using the same filament? Just so you know, bed levelling only affects the first or first few layers; so it would not be the cause of the pproblem you are seeing.

Yup it could be; I have never printed anything that thin with nylon

Depends on who you are talking to! I would consider 35mm/s to be on the borderline but maybe UM have designed their nylon to be printed at 75mm/s. Do you have any recommendations from them on the packet or the web. Not that I use them but I have seen UM standard settings that amaze me - not in a good way. Lol I have never printed anything at 75mm/s let alone with nylon. And imho 75mm/s is too fast for something that small, in terms of getting a decent finish. The rule for good small stuff is slow and cool; as I said earlier it could be that really small and nylon are incompatible, although Taulman recommend 25mm/s maybe slower for their older nylons.

Well I normally print my own designs and they are designed to a .4mm nozzle but If I were printing somebody else's I would still set the line width to 0.4mm and let the slicer use infill. But each to their own

Your filament supplier should have published recommended settings somewhere - if not find another supplier! Everything I have read has nylon printing at lower speeds- but this will be filament dependent to a certain extent - it may be that printing really small stuff with nylon is incompatible. I do not print small stuff normally (and never with nylon) and I think I read that with small you may need to go faster otherwise the heat of the extruder dawdling over the small dimensions can cause problems. This is why getting the recommendations is important because my comments come from only experience with Taulman.

Well fwiw in my book and I know others disagree!, but if you do not match your nozzle size you are just asking for trouble so why do it.

Well I would leave it at 10 seconds and add more copies - once it stops moving away you know you have enough copies on the bed. If it was PLA I would say the filament should not string when it moves away, i.e. if it does you have a setting wrong somewhere, but I have never printed that small with nylon and so would not like to make a similar comment as I have never experienced it.