Crusty

That's great mrdindon. I seem to remember altering skirt/brim flow rate but without success. I think I was using Cura 4.0 at the time but I am now running Cura 4.3 so maybe that will allow me to to alter flow rates. I haven't had the need to check this out as I'm having success now with the Kapton and I no longer need to print a brim.

I never did get to the bottom of the printer settings but then I ran out of hairspray and replaced it with a different brand. The new brand acted more as a release agent than an adhesive so I then started using Kaptan tape which I found to be so good that I no longer needed to start with a brim. I needed a wider tape so I bought some from Ebay but beware! What was listed as Kaptan tape was on a reel printed Kapton and it was as much use as a non-stick frying pan. The moral of the story is:- Experiment with different combinations of materials, suppliers and temperatures and write down everything that you do. When you find something that works just stick with it.

Hi RG Your photo doesn't seem to have downloaded so it's difficult to comment further. However, having looked more closely at your original photo, are we looking at an infill over the large rectangular surface? If that is so then perhaps you should try to reduce your infill density and see what happens. Also, what is the underside of the first layer like when you remove it from the bed? Maybe you have an adhesion problem. I wanted to try blue painters tape but I haven't been able to find any stockists here in the UK although it seems to be advertised everywhere in the USA. I tried some Scotch green tape which is used for road markings and PLA seemed to adhere well to that but being a crepe paper base the tape it has a tendency to de-laminate at the edges leaving the base of the print warped. I had a lot of success with the 'salt method'. My prints would stick firmly to a glass bed at 60deg. and would just ping off as the bed cooled down. The underside of the prints were perfectly flat right up to the edges and had a glass finish with the exception that under a magnifying glass minute crystals of salt could be seen embedded in the surface. My perfect solution to adhesion is 'Kapton' tape. Adhesion is effective right up to the very edge and although I haven't tried it yet, it should be possible to get full adhesion without the need for a brim. I am still using a narrow brim simply to get a good flow of PLA going before the print proper starts. The finish is glass smooth but because there is no 'stretch' in the tape it is not the easiest of materials to apply single handed without some practice. I stick it down at one end first and then gently squeegee along using the edge of a credit card to remove all air bubbles. Once it is on it will last for many prints.

Not quite sure what you mean by an 'ocean wave' look but if you are printing a straight line and it ends up wavy then quite likely your nozzle is much too far away from the bed. Check your nozzle to bed gap using a piece of paper as a feeler gauge - you should just detect some resistance to movement of the paper when it is just trapped under the nozzle and for most 80gsm weight papers that will give you a gap of around 0.1mm. Also check on your Cura print settings under the quality section that you haven't specified an inappropriate initial layer height.

I was printing out a particular component with reasonable results but the print settings settings really needed a bit more tweaking. The problem is that once you have made a change or two then it is difficult to recall your previous settings and now I can no longer seem to adjust my brim line width as I would like. Originally the lines of my brim would touch one another and fuse together which was fine as it gave the brim a lot of strength. Now my lines are well separated and any attempt at increasing the line width so that they can fuse together seems to have no effect. I originally found my optimum was a 0.7mm brim line width and 110% initial layer line width. but now things have all gone haywire and even though I have now increased the brim line width to 1.2mm I seem to have reverted to thin lines that are thinner and all well spaced from one another. Any ideas would be gratefully received as would any suggestions as to how to squash up the initial layer lines a little so that there is less visual demarcation between them. I cannot remember with certainty but I think at some stage I also increased the brim line speed which is now set to 40 mm/s, although if I did change it I have no idea what it was originally set at.

I am new to 3D printing and use an entry level Anet A8 with increasing success the more practice I get. I use a 0.4mm nozzle, now at 205deg.C and the bed at 70deg.C, these settings seem to work well with my PLA on a glass bed with extra firm hold hairspray. I designed a component with an 8mm wide brim which seemed to print very satisfactorily, the brim being a quite sturdy solid mass which measures between 0.31 and 0.37mm thick. The brim has 10 growth rings visible which are all fused together and 0.8mm wide each. I printed off two of these components and then my son had a look at my computer which was taking a long time to boot up. He identified the problem as being caused by Cura 4.0 which I must confess, after an awkward installation, seemed to tie up with the time at which the computer was playing up. He uninstalled Cura and reinstalled it after which the brim of this component would no longer print as before. It was now printing a brim with 20 lines each 0.4mm wide, the lines would not fuse together so adhesion was not good enough to hold. I delved a little more into the workings of Cura and found that as there was no template for an Anet A8 printer I had to specify my own custom printer and settings, taking advice from the fly out message boxes for each individual setting. I have set all line widths to 0.4mm except the brim line width which I set to 0.8mm and the initial layer line width at 100%, which seems to be the default setting. If I increase that to 200% then the box just turns orange so I left it at the default of 100%. The brim speed is 30mm/sec and the brim line count sets itself automatically to 10 for an 8mm brim width. All would seem well with no reason why it should not print these components as it did before the re-installation. However it now prints a brim of 10 single separated lines which measure up between 0.24 and 0.27mm diameter. Under the ‘extruder’ tab of ‘machine settings’ I change the filament diameter from 2.85 to 1.75mm as that is what I use but after I have done my slicing and I look again at the extruder settings I find that it has reverted to 2.85mm. The other interesting thing is that if I open the G-Code file so generated, in a Word document, then the second line of instructions for the skirt specifies E0.01485 for the 0.4mm brim line width and E0.02934 for the 0.8mm brim line width. These are figures I would guess to be correct for printing a nice sturdy fused brim but it still prints out 10 single spaced 0.4mm lines. I’m at a loss now as to why I can no longer print just ten 0.8mm lines. Can anyone help please? By the way I have been using a 0.1mm layer thickness and 100% infill density.