yellowshark

And then there is the possible effect on axis, belts, bearings. Can't be good if it goes where oil should be going. Lol intelligent people take the plate out of the printer to spray it 8)

Yup I have thought about that but think it will take longer for that 2nd plate to get up to temoerature. If I am doing a production run, maybe 50 pieces, I cannot wait too long in between each print. I take out the plate on completion, room is circa 22 degrees ambient, and lay it on a glass table. The plate is down to circa 45 degrees in say 5-6 mins and off the piece pops and the plate is back up to 60/65 5 or so minutes later - the first thing I do when the print completes is to raise the bed temp up to 90+ ready to warm the plate quickly when it is put back.

I wipe the nozzle with isopropyl alcohol and it does exactly as you ask 8)

If temperature resistance is a consideration then nGen could be considered. I finds it prints as easily as PLA, has fewer colours, and without doing extensive testing I think has a better finish. I had a PLA part for inside the car which warped on one particular hot day which I have successfully (so far) replaced with nGen

Hi @ahoeben, any progress on this bug? For me at least it is a real PIA

We do, you must be lookig at the wrong threads:)! I have used PLA/hairspray for 3 years + on a glass bed. I find actually that it is easy to remove a piece even with the plate being warm. I can take it off the bed, set at 60-65, lay it on a table and after 30-60secs it will come off. Ofc that will be affected by your nozzle to plate distance and removing the plate from the printer straightaway has shrinkage implications. And of course it is so easy to apply, has good longevity and is easy to clean off 8)

Hmn, well yes it does! I have never seen different speeds on the intial layer. I.E. if print speed is 50mm/s amd initial layer is set to 20mm/s, everything on the intial layer gets printed at 20mm/s. I will cc @nallath in here as I have no idea why you are seeing this. Yes you have a tricky print there. I would suggest 1st layer print speed no faster then 15mm/s Reduce the nozzle to bed depth (yes I know you have probably done auto levelling) to make sure that 1st layer is really being squashed down - you can always back it out if you go to far

Hi I think you guys have this wrong; @lance-greene says he is using a Custom profile. This does not use 3rd party contributions - that is when you select Other printer. With Custom printer you set it all up for your printer. This is I suggest a CURA bug. I suffered it with 2.4 Beta and 2.4 Beta 2 - but I do not recall having seen it in 2.4 Release. Before I installed 2.4 Release I went to the Machine_instances folder and deleted every printer file just in case

Hmn, I have an i5, 8mb ram and ordinary video card and I find perfromance to be fine - I do though generally work with a single model rather than multiple copies. I do agreee that multiple copies is not as good as 15.n. If you have not done so I would recommend that you go to settings visibility and set evertyhing ON and then go through each setting. You will find some strange defaults that Cura has which you will not be aware of unless you turn everything on. You can afterwards of course turn a lot of the settings off after you have changed the defaults where necessary.

I have found this variable but you seem to need to move it by grabbing the coloured direction indicators rather than the model itself

Yup no support, of course it will depend but your curve looks very similar to my piece. Settings I used - for my printer - were .100 layers 30mm/s print speed 205 extruder temp. Flow 100% bed temp 65 continuous 1st layer speed 15mm/s walls 1.2 26% infill Infill before walls Skirt Top layers 8 ) These two settings may need reversing; that is what my notes say but as the piece Bottom layers 3 ) was turned upside down I may have reversed these settings and not updated the notes Regular fan speed,100%, at layer 5

I recently printed something seemingling similar. with similar problem. I turned it upside down and it came out great

Simple solution, which I have used for 3 years, is to download Repetier Host (free), which has solid USB connection and some good functions, to run your printer. Load your Cura sliced .stl file into RH and away you go. I am not at all sure on where you go with firmware as my printer came pre-loaded with RH firmware

Ooh some nice stuff there, very clever. Unfortunately us mere mortals without S3D and layer height procedures cannot do that, I think!

I for one would welcome a similar implementation to that provided by S3D. Just allowing me to set layer ranges providing the ability to change layer height is all I really need - ideally plus changing those parameters one might like to change to support the increase/decrease to the volume of filament flowing through. Nothing automatic, just let me take the responsibility. It is really the only thing that still makes me want to change to S3D - I would really benefit from it - although out of principle the lack of a demo version still prevents doing this!!! Not forgetting of course the outstanding Cura support provided by this Forum

It used to be in Machine Settings in 13/14/15.n I think. But it is not in Printer settings in 2.4

Thank you8)

Hi Nicolas, Lots of good points above. In my experience if the hardware and software are set up correctly/appropriately then on the x/y axes you should achieve at least 50 micron accuracy, consistently. You can achieve better results maybe with variation but of course once you get to say 20 or 30 micron accuracy then how good you are at measuring is a big factor. If you have not been trained then you probably are not. Managing shrinkage can be assisted by • Running your extruder as cool as possible • Having you environment at say at least 20c or warmer. • Leaving your part in the printer until the bed and printer have cooled to ambient temp. • Leaving your part in the environment for 24 hours (relevant for N Europe in the winter, maybe not Florida all year round!). I appreciate the 3rd point may be awkward. PLA ranges from semi-crystalline to fully amorphous; crystalline polymers shrink more than amorphous polymers. Thicker walls cause more shrinkage in injection moulding, I assume the same applies with 3D printing. How much you squash down your 1st layer (nozzle to bed distance) also can impact your results. I had a part recently where I had to squash it down a lot to get adhesion, which causes elephant feet and I had to take 100 microns off the x/y dimension on the bottom 300 microns of the part to get the dim. right. This squashing also impacts the Z dimension, which is harder to resolve as you are constrained by the layer height unless you are slicing with S3D (I am not aware of a Cura add-on which lets you modify layer heights but I could be wrong). We never print a dimensionally critical part above 30mm/s but If you do need to print faster then I guess the answer is to review the results and try to modify the part dimensions until you get a match. I do not know what precise tolerances you have to work to but with a physically new machine you should be able to achieve 100 micron accuracy quite easily and 50 microns with some care. HTH

"... That large piece went from one entire quarter peeling up by the 4th layer, to now I can't lay a single bead to start because the line rolls itself up, or if it does stick in an area initially it is pulled off line by the continued bead.... Yup @gr5 is absolutely right. Your lines of filament need to be "flat" not "round". If you find your walls on the 1st layer are sticking well but the infill is not sticking then you have gone to far, back it off a little - .050mm can make a huge difference

I visited the Prusa website but could not find a download, anyone have a url?

Thank you for your thorough answer @hoeben , all clear now!

Actually one area that none of us have mentioned is the setting of the nozzle to print distance. As a general principle moving the two closer together squishes down the filament and improves adhesion (sometimes dramatically, depending on what your starting point is). Only up to a point though, go too far and the reverse will happen.

Hmn well I suppose one answer is that once I get the distance sweet I then never touch it, i.e. irrespective if which part I print I am always using the same distance. BUT if I do have to change the distance (there is one part that this applies to) that is done via the z-offset command and so that is stored in the gcode file. If I kept changing the physical distance then I would need to document the changes separately and manually otherwise when I reprint a part it will come out wrong.

Interesting, I can understand reducing the flow to get lower extrusion, but not so clear on the lower height initial layer. If I reduce initial layer from .3 to .2 the nozzle to bed distance will be reduced by .1 by Cura and so the "pressure" caused by the nozzle to bed distance will still be there?

So does that make the nozzle width on the Printer settings dialogue box superfluous? Why is it there if you set the nozzle size via the line width? Why is it*7/8 rather than *1?. What happens, if anything, if the nozzle size in the Printer settings is set to .4 but the line width is set to .8*7/8? Just trying to understand fully how this stuff works if I want to swap from 0.4 to 0.8