yellowshark

Hi edit-mesh, OK several things I reprinted the model at a slower speed to improve the accuracy – this time all the wall measurement widths were less than 100 micron error rate J. Although the left north/south wall was around 50microns wider than the others; no idea why, a bit strange as you seem to have the same thing. Not wanting to miss anything I reversed engineered your STL file into Solidworks; all the walls measured 2mm (accepting that the process rounds dimensions to 100 microns i.e 2.049mm would be 2.0mm). I tried using your gcode, it has walls set to 0.8mm and 0% infill. Checking it in Repetier-Host it all looked fine. The first pic shows the print with a gap running along the entire model (except for the sloped wall). The second pic shows the end of the print where the top solid layers (6x0.1mm) have filled in the gap – including the left-side north/south wall you are having the problem with. There is one important point on this pic. i.e.for this 2nd print I imported your gcode into Cura 14.7 so that I could cut off the bottom 45mm or so of the model to speed up the print time. I did not change any of your settings in Cura. So it was sliced by 14.7 Conclusions: Well I do not think there is anything wrong with your model and gcode. Maybe, as you are on a release candidate, there is an argument for trying a previous version of Cura, but I am not convinced – although I did take your gcode into 14.07 and re-sliced for the 2nd print run. What I do not understand is, if it is a hardware problem, why is the right-side north/south wall working OK? I have to confess I am at a loss at this point. Do youu have other rectangular models that are printing OK?

Me too although I use a J cloth, more protective than a paper towel. For those bits that refuse to move then holding the nozzle in boiling water makes them very easy to scrape off; good for removing anything from the inside of the nozzle too.

So how did you get it to stick to the bed?

Hi 0235, OK it will help if you try to be more specific when oyu have a major problem. You talk about a big print but to some people a tower at .05 micron with abase of 5mm suare and a height of 200mm is big! OK so you have now clarified I think by saying that there is no room for a brim, therefore the base is close to the size of the print bed. Your likely problem as it is sticking on one side and not the other is you need to get your bed level spot on. Even if you think it is OK do it again!! Then print a test cube in each of the 4 corners and make sure they all stick. Also we cannot help very much if you do not tell us your settings. I would suggest that your first layer should be 0.3mm layer depth; speed of 20mm/s; bed temperature of 65 degrees; all assuming you are using a normal Colorfabb filiament, ie not wood fill or something like that IMPORTANT!! do not warm up the bed, let it get to 65 degrees and start the print. The whole bed needs to get to 65. It depends on your printer but it is likely that once the centre gets to 65 the perimeters may be 15 degrees cooler. If you do not have a digital thermometer get one. If you do then measure the perimeters and wait until they get to 65. IMPORTANT2!! If you have a bed with a glass plate laid on top, the printer will be measuring the bed temperature not the glass temperature. To get the glass to 65 you probably want to set the bed temp to 73 or so and again you need to measure the glass temp before starting.

Hi edit-mesh, I have just looked at your most recent post - re fooling the slicer. There was a discussion where, for example, with a 0.4 nozzle and walls set to 0.8mm, a 1.6mm physical wall was not printed properly. I do not think anyone stated why this happened but some solutions were put forward. Searching through my notes I found a document that showed that it had happened to me, which no doubt is why I was so interested in the postings. This pic shows the error This pic shows the result after the fix. The document is dated December 2013 and I suspect the thread on this forum was December too (or November/January). Unfortunately I can find no notes anywhere apart from the two pics.

Hi, edit-mesh, two prints of the model here. I sliced your model in Cura 14.07 with 0.8 walls. Looking at layer view there was a gap along the middle of the walls so it was clear that I had the 2.0mm wall model not the 1.6mm model. So I set the walls to 0.4mm and changed infill from 0% to 100%. I also cut 40mm of the object bottom to reduce the print time. Here is the finished print, which you can see does not exhibit your problems. Note that the strings of filament are due to my mistake of not enabling retraction. I then set the walls to 1.2 and infill to 0% and retraction to on and sliced in Cura 14.07. Taking the gcode into Repetier-Host I saw that The two outside legs, running east/west had four walls with a gap inbetween. The two inside legs running north/south had five walls with no gaps. The central sloping wall had 6 walls with no gaps I have no idea how the slicer works when you define wall thicknesses which will exceed the physical dimension in the model - all I can say is that the output was more consistent than the layer view suggested! Here is the finished print. As you can see the walls have no gaps. Setting the walls to 1.2 though did no favours to the sloped wall! Looking at dimensions and accuracy the results of the first run with 0.4 walls was very disappointing. Running from left to right they were Wall1 2.42mm Wall2 2.36mm Wall3(the sloped wall) 2.40mm Wall4 2.17mm Wall5 2.25mm I normally see accuracy of < .100 error and always below .150 error. I have never printed with 0.4 walls and this was run at 50mm/s. If I am doing an accurate engineering print I never go above 30mm/s. Also I have not used this filament before and that could be having an effect. I am going to run it again with a known filament and slower. Also I will now have a go at running your gcode. Also I will have a go at reverse engineering it into Solidworks to check the dimensions. BUT with my results so far I do not think there is anything intrinsically wrong with the model and that you do have a problem at your end. And yes I do think that changing one of the settings by 0.1 to fool the slicer might work. Another thing you could try is to rotate the model on the x/y plane by 45 degrees. That might work and it might give you some help in trying to identify the problem.

Hi Tottenham (I guess you chose that name after Dafoe joined Toronto ) I certainly do not want to dissuade you from any testing, that is always a good thing! But I was wondering why you print the test pieces when you change the filament to retune the printer. Changing filament does not change the physical characteristics of the printer so I am wondering why it needs a retune. EG if your bed level was right before changing the filament it will be the same after changing the filament. To be clear I am not saying you are doing anything wrong, I am just curious

Yup you want to go real slow, 30 should be OK but even try 20 if need be. And you want fans at 100%. I am thinking that if you are using thin layers, say100, it might be useful as a trial to go thicker. My logic is that there is more plastic to be raised which may reduce/remove the affect. Make sure your minimum layer time is at least 10 secs. The pieces are very small so you will have to print 2 or more to achieve this. Try using z-lift too (this will most likely introduce some stringing

Hi edit-mesh, do you have Repetier-host on your PC? If you do load the stl file and look at the layer view. RH sometimes shows up things that Cura may not. If you do not then mail me the stl file and I will take a look. Also there have been a few reports of a similar problem on the forum over the past 18 months. I am trying to remember the exact cure but cannot. It is something like set your model width to 1.61 or set your wall width to 0.81 or set your nozzle width to 3.9 I have seen it once or twice on my prints but it has never been important so I have not pursued it. When you say you get different dimensions, is that because you see the gap and are assuming a different dimension or have you measured with a vernier gauge. If so what is the measurement difference?

That would be useful/interesting. I have not used the leaf green filament before so the extruder temps were guesses and possibly not the optimum. So it may be that you get some better results than me; although the overall finish was fine so I do not think I was far away from optimum. Printed on a 3ntr, the A1 not the new A2. I had forgotten about the section on pillowing in the troubleshooting guide. I know it is for the Ultimaker but I think the statement to use a minimum of 6 layers is a bit misleading. With 300 micron layers I normally use 3 layers, but I normally use 40% infill, hence switching it to 4 layers for the 20% infill

Yes it is possible to receive a bad spool whether it be of the same colour used before or a different colour. I received a bad spool from Colorfabb about a year ago (a filament that I had bought from them previously) and they changed it immediately. Of course you need calliper to be sure that it is the spool measurements that are wrong.

Hi pm-dude, to answer your query. There are a couple of basic rules in play here… It is the amount of filament that is deposited, not the number of layers, that is important. Generally speaking it is probably good to say that at least 3 layers should be used. The thinner the layers used then the more filament that has to be deposited for the top layers; this is exacerbated by sparse infill and I think to a certain extent by print speed also, although I have never done any real testing on this last point. To illustrate these points I have pics. These were all done one after the other using Colorfabb’s leaf green. The base setting was 300 microns at 50mm/s, temp of 210 and fans at 100. Where the layer thickness or speed changed, I adjusted the extruder temp.; the fan% and extruder temp. were stabilised before 25% of the cube was printed. I watched all of the prints continuously to check that there was no under extrusion prior to and during the printing of the top layers – all were OK. Pic 1: this shows 300 microns at 50mm/s at 210. I used 0.9mm top layer for this rather than the 1.2mm I recommended. As you can see the top layers are pretty good. With the light angled just right you can see slight pillowing (not sure if the photo will show it.) Pic 2: is the same again but with top layers of 1.2. Zero pillowing. Pic 3: is for comparison with pic 1. This is 100 microns at 50mm/s at 205 using 0.9 top layers. As you can see poor finish with three holes. This demonstrates the disparity between thick and thin layers over sparse infill. Pic 4: is the same again but using 1.2mm top layers. Still a poor finish with pillowing but the three holes have disappeared. So with 100 micron layer over sparse infill at reasonably fast speed, even 12 layers were not sufficient. Pic 5: This is 100 microns using 0.9 layers but using a print speed of 30mm/s and temp of 200. As can be seen an improvement over pic 3, and, just about the same as pic 4. I.E. slowing the print speed helps. Pic 6: shows the substantial difference between sparse infill and using 40% infill. This is 100 microns at 50mm/s at 205 and 40% infill using 0.6mm top layers (yes that was six). Almost, but not quite a perfect finish. Probably another two layers would sort it.

Is it just layer 1 duffy london or does the filament "stick to the nozzle or not come out" after you have printed layer 1?

Hi Mark, I am guessing from your settings that your layer height is around .100. I do not think that 1mm top layers is enough, especially at that speed. I rarely go as low as 20% infill, but with 20% and .300 layers I use 1.2mm. I have not done any great analysis/testing of this but it seems to me that with sparse infill you need a greater depth of top layers the thinner your layer height. So in the same scenario, with .100 layer depth I would use more than 1.2mm. Easiest way to resolve is to print test cubes until you are happy

Personally I use all, or a combination of (all depends on the size and geometry) print two off the pieces concurrently (same as using a tower but can be more productive) set minimum layer time to 10 secs (I know George likes to go lower but it suits me). minimum speed to 10mm/s also I have been using z-lift in recent months which has been effective. Yes you can suffer from oozing but with a little practice you can wipe that away just before the head moves back to print the next layer fans 100%

Hi Manny, if a video is not possible can you print it again and then stop the print as soon as it starts to fail and then take some pics without touching the model, i.e leave it on the bed as it was.

Ok a couple of questions first. What is "LH"? Is it layer height? If so then that is at least part of your problem. I have never heard of anyone printing with1.0mm thickness let alone 1.5mm. I wonder if it is possible. What shell thickness are you using? What is your retraction speed and distance? In your 1st pic you seem to be saying that at some heights the new layer is being started on an inner wall and at other heights it is starting on the outside wall. What did you configure to make that happen? In pic 2 are you using the same layer height below and above the hole; they look different to me. If you have two windows close to each other then in my experience the short run between the two windows can be quite difficult to get printed nicely. Best done at 20mm/s, definitely not 50mm/s. I would suggest you try again with LH of 0.3mm, speed of 20mm/s and temp maybe 210 although I am assuming that is UM blue filament which I have not used.

I know it is probably not what you are really looking for but I overcame that by buying Faberdashery filament sold "loose" i.e. not on a reel. You use the entire length without any issues in the Bowden

If you are printing 100 micron layers at 30mm/s then going to 230 is unnecessarily way too hot and will not be doing you any favours. If you have to do that then you are masking a problem which in the longer term you will benefit from finding and fixing. I have not used the Stone filament but with those settings you should be able to easily print most Faberdashery filaments at 200.

Hi Mark, my take on your problem is that for whatever reason there is a moment in time, lasting a short period of time, when your filament is getting "stuck", slowing down the flow. I use Arctic white a lot and have not experienced your problem with it; so I am thinking it is probably not the filament. But have you measured it?, just in case. A couple of weeks back I was printing some Xmas decorations. I started with a blue then swapped to Arctic white. I kept getting the occasional bit of blue coming out. I did an atomic pull 4 or 5 times and all were clean apart from the first pull, but the bits of blue kept coming. I was about to fit a new nozzle but it now seems to have stopped polluting my white filament. So changing to a new nozzle may well not be a waste of time; a cheap way of knocking out one variable. As an aside, based on personal experience, you may well be printing the Arctic white too hot. I would print .100 at 50mm/s at 205 and it seems to me that Arctic white is somewhat less forgiving at the "wrong" temp. than most of my other Faberdashery filaments. I have printed Arctic white at 50mm/s without problem but as someone else posted, I think it is worth dropping the speed for the moment to see what if any affect that has.

Hi Mark, I am running as follows .200 at 30mm/s using 200c; if there is bridging I would change to 205c Then for the following I am getting good results but would probably try reducing the temps by 5c... .300 at 60mm/s using 220c .150 at 50mm/s using 210c .300 at 50mm/s using 215c I think with a lot of filaments one can be off the optimum temp. by 5c or even 10c without really seeing much difference but Arctic white seems to be a bit less forgiving. Please note the above temps. are not from printing on a UM so you might need to do a few tests to find the offset for your printer.

Hi Mark, I use Faberdashery's Mercury Red and Arctic white a lot and never have problems with them. I do find that Arctic white seems to flow thicker, if that makes any sense, and run that a lower temperature to avoid any blobs appearing when turning corners.

They are not 3d models but 3d views stored in pdf files for sharing

Alternatively if you do not have lead solder I think you will find that silver solder melts at a much higher temp. Available at online jewellery bits stores

"Always remember:..........." +1 and. 0.05 gap is too small and you will need to do well to get consistently get accuracy of 0.05 anyway. You will need to trial and error this one to get the fit you want. I suggest you start with a gap all round of 0.2mm and go from there.