GregValiant

There may be something wrong with the model, or at least something that Cura doesn't like. In Cura - what does it look like in Preview? That will be what is sent to the Gcode file. Have you tried to export the file in a different format? (something other than .OBJ that Cura will open)

Have you tried "Spiralize Outer Contour"? It doesn't like horizontal surfaces but anything VaseLike comes out very well. You would need to look at the preview very closely to see if there are areas where the lines are so widely spaced that they don't make contact and you are printing on air.

"Your model is not manifold" error. It can't be sliced because it isn't a solid and it's not closed. You'll need to do something in Fusion to create a solid model. I don't know Fusion but in other programs you could make a solid base and then do Surface Cuts and eliminate the areas that aren't part of the car.

PLA essentially doesn't warp. Long narrow parts may test that statement but I don't see a need to raise the parts off the bed. IF warping happens that's a problem that can be dealt with. I don't want to get you down, but right now all you have is a mess. Keep it simple. Do one part at a time. Put the part on the build surface. Give yourself the best chance at being successful.

Careful is the key word. Heat up the hot end to soften the mess. I try and pick away at it with tweezers. If you have to use a knife make very sure you don't nick a wire.

What happens when you use one of the grips to pull the part?

You need something more accurate that a ruler to perform the measurements. A vernier caliper works well. I think that not enough people pay attention to the frame of the machine. Everything needs to be square and parallel. A carpenters tri-square comes in handy. If (for example) the X beam is at a slight angle then your prints will be off no matter how well the steps are calibrated. Or if the two upright beams aren't parallel then the part will twist as it gets taller. After the machine gets a few hours on it you will want to re-visit the calibration again as things loosen up.

I would start with the slots clear of the raised areas by .25mm constant all the way around. So if a raised area is 1mm x 5mm I would have the slot at 1.5mm x 5.5mm. You can make up a small test piece with some slots on one half and matching raised areas on the other half. Print it and cut it apart and test fit them together so you don't have to print both of the real pieces. If things still don't fit together go to .35 all the way around. Once you have it dialed in then make adjustments to the real parts and print them up.

When printing with wall line count at 3 I've had the infill kinda show through. Increasing the wall count usually gets rid of the marks. At a wall line count of 5 I rarely see it. I've never played with Infill Overlap Percentage but it sounds like the kind of setting that could have an effect on low line count walls and marring of the surface by the starts and stops of the nozzle when putting the infill in place.

Once there is heat damage to the bowden tube it doesn't go away by itself and doesn't care what material is run. BUT...Looking at the video again, it looks like a normal retraction. The motor is turning so slow it's hard to get a feel for what's going on. After the motor starts back up does it start from that retracted position? It's supposed to go back to the previous position. You might check the "Travel / Retraction Prime Speed" setting in Cura. I think the default is 45mm/sec.

Another thing would be how much clearance you left (in the model file) between the raised portions of the yellow piece and the slots in the black piece.

That's the extruder skipping steps when it can't provide enough torque to push the filament. You are clogged in either the nozzle or hot end. I'll put my money on the hot end. The higher temps required by PETG put heat stress on the bowden tube material that is within the hot end. Over time that changes the shape of the inside diameter and causes jams. The good stuff (Capricorn PTFE tubing) holds up better but it will still give out. I've had to replace the bowden tube twice. If you carefully remove the bowden tube and put it in backwards (extruder end into the hot end) maybe you can bring it back to life for a while. Make sure the ends are cut perfectly square. It needs to provide a seal against the back of the nozzle.

From one old shop rat to another...you're welcome.

And now you're learning differential calculus and why PI is a never ending fractional number. At the top of the sphere the angle of a tangent line starts to approach 0 degrees. Cura considers the area under the nozzle as a rectangle with 90 degree sides. When it calculates a layer, it pushes the rectangle up against the side of the sphere. When it calculates the next layer it can't slide the rectangle over quite as far. That leaves a little gap that is your step. Lowering the layer height is all you can do. If the layer height was .00001mm you would still have a step. It would be a really small step, but it would be there. As the layer height approaches zero the step width approaches zero but it never can get there. The same thing happens on inclined surfaces but the steps are all the same size and are all triangular when viewed as a cross section.

The easiest way to get to know this stuff is to play with it. Download files, slice them this way and that. Open up Gcode files with Notepad and get familiar with what kind of codes are being used for printing as opposed to routering because there will be differences. Most download files will be stereolithography STL files that you will open in Cura to slice. Cura will know how big your build volume is. If the model comes into Cura too big for your machine then Cura will put zebra stripes on it and tell you it can't be sliced. There are no dimensions in Cura. The only way to tell how big something is would be to slice it with say .1 layer height and check how many layers there are. Then re-slice the way you want the thing printed. On the left side of the Cura screen are some tools. Click on the model and then select the "Scale" tool. You can enter numbers in the boxes or just grab a handle on the model and drag it. Either way you can get the thing to fit your build space. If the model was drawn in English units it may come in really small. The scale then is 2540% to get it to metric which Cura uses. If the model is to be part of an assembly than all parts would have to be scaled the same so they would fit together. Now repeat after me..."I [insert name here] will NEVER blindly trust a Gcode file that somebody else created." When you download a Gcode file you have no idea what the machine parameters were when the thing was sliced. You can open Gcode files in Cura and it will be shown in preview mode but the file cannot be changed from within Cura. You would still want to open the file in Notepad to look at the opening code and make sure there isn't something in there (like M190 or M140) that your machine won't like. (Any line in a Gcode file that starts with a semi-colon is a comment and is ignored by the printer.) And you have to check the G1 and G0 lines for any X and Y values that are negative numbers. Your machine won't like that either but it will try to print WAAAYY over there and bang into your end stops. A Gcode file is just a simple text file. You copy it from the hard drive and save it to the SD card in a normal Windows or Mac way. You should keep Gcode file names short because most printers don't deal with long file names very well. After you print a Gcode file you can throw it away. As you get familiar with the software, you'll get better at slicing and if you wanted to print the thing again, you'd want to update the slicing anyway.

The geometry of a part is part of your problem. Cura knows it missed spots and goes back and fills them. You can see them in the preview view. They will be little areas of yellow infill amidst all the red and green wall lines. The more sides a piece has the less noticeable the problem is. When you have only three sides and your nozzle is round, it can't get tight into the corners and the software knows that. For structural soundness, filling those gaps is the thing to do. There are settings that will cause it as well. I know Combing will run the head all over as it tries to avoid printed areas. I haven't used Fill Gaps Between Walls but it sounds like the kind of thing that will cause a lot of running around also. Hopefully a moderator will chip in with some ideas for you.

The image does appear to be severely over-extruded. That would push the sides of the slots in. When you say "way to small" what does that mean. How wide are the slots as designed? It's hard to get a sense of scale from the images.

I started in tool & die when I was 13 when dad would drag me off on Saturdays to run a drill press. Then a lathe. Then that god awful horizontal boring mill that was off a WWI battleship. I miss that boring mill. I was looking around trying to find a picture of an xvico so I could respond to Geneo's other post and I came across this youtube video on the machine as he says, the Xvico looks like a clone of an Ender 3. I would think the numerous help for the Ender 3 would apply to the xvico. As to what flavor of firmware it is running, there should be a selection on the LCD that is "About..." the machine. The firmware flavor should be mentioned in there. It's something that Cura needs to know. In Cura you should have added a printer that has all the proper settings for your xvicos. In Cura under Monitor/{your printer}/Manage Printers/Machine Settings make sure everything is set for the xvico. If heated bed is checked then Cura will always put an M190 line in the start of the Gcode file and that means "Wait for bed temperature" which of course would be forever on your machine. As I mentioned in the other thread, make sure Center = 0 in NOT selected. Your 0,0,0 is the left front corner. Geneo, I think you mean the Bowden tube. Look around the internet for Capricorn PTFE tubing.

Like gr5 says, it's a setting. If you are doing the slicing and both your printer and Cura are set up as Center = 0 then all is well and good. While you are in those settings double check that all of them match your machine. The first movement command in a Gcode file is G28. That tells the printer to "Go Home". It is the only position where the printer actually knows where the print head is because it's up against the three switches. Since that's where your printer headed, then Home 0,0,0 must the Left Front Corner on the machine. That is hardwired in because that's where the switches are. There is also a 0,0,0 used for actual printing. It is referred to as Home Offset. After you "Auto Home" the print head from the LCD (left front corner) you can move the print head (using the movement controls on the LCD) to the middle of the build plate and then select "Set Home Offset" under the Prepare menu. I respectfully suggest that you do not do that. Instead, from Home 0,0,0 move the print head X10mm and Y10mm and then select Set Home Offset on the LCD. In Cura, do as gr5 says and make sure that Center = 0 is De-selected so that 0,0,0 is in the left front corner. And relax. If your getting all wound up now when you're just getting started, think about how bad it's gonna be in two weeks when you're totally confused.

I'm a poor American stuck in "English" units too. I was a tool designer for 40 years. Design software uses units. But what 1 unit equals is all in the users head. Autocad doesn't know or care if 1 unit is a 1 nanometer or a 1 lightyear. Generally you have to measure something or check the size of the text to tell what units the designer had in mind when the model (or 2d drawing) was created. If baloney, milk, bread, gasoline and beer had been sold here in metric units, housewives would have bought in, and the United States would be full metric by now.

Rocket was my second guess. As I said, I really have struggled with white PLA and those banding lines. I was going to try printing a temperature tower with the white and see if I could eliminate the problem but I ended up using all the white up. I'm a mechanical guy so as long as it's structurally sound I generally let it pass. Ain't nobody gonna see it but me anyway. Has that problem been consistent with other colors? I believe the white has a lot of titanium oxide in it (to make it white) and that might have an effect on the flow characteristics. At any rate, right now I'm resigned to the fact that if I print in white the finish won't be good. If it was Cura I'd have the problem across all colors and regardless of whether it was PLA or PETG. (In PETG I have the same banding problem with silver too. Black and red never do it.) One wheel on the X carriage and two wheels on the Y carriage are on eccentric cams so they can be tightened up. Whether they are wearing or not they are adjustable to compensate for that. If the carriages don't wiggle they are good to go. Mine don't wiggle, my Z lead screw is nice and free and lubed with dry teflon, and I get the banding. I think it's color related. I've only used Matter Hacker products so far (they're cheap) and products from other manufacturers may not do it. I'd try printing the same rocket Gcode file with another color. You could abort it after 2 or 3 cm since the problem starts right from the get-go.

I'd create two files and splice them together at: a layer change (if the layer heights were the same) or at a point in the file where the Z heights were the same (if the layer heights are different). You would likely have to reset the extruder so it continues across the splice seamlessly (G92 Exxx) and maybe have an XY and/or Z move to insure a smooth transition. From that point to the end of the file would be Profile #2. Usually I do this when I want a change in infill. If the splice is at a layer change you have to remember that Cura layers start at 1 and Gcode layers start at 0.

I get them with Matter Hacker white PLA but not with blue, black, red or gray. The only exception was when I printed a sailboat hull in white and in vase mode. I thought it came out well without the heavy banding I'd experienced with the white, but it was really thin walled so I reprinted it in red and .6 line width. That's when I found out what it was supposed to look like. Just out of curiosity are those boat hulls printed in vase mode?

Yes, it isn't simple. In fact these are (at the same time) both the simplest and the most complicated machines I've ever worked on. Everything effects everything. From the baseline volume there are other algorithms that vary that value. I hand coded some prime lines across the front of the build surface (easy to yank off on the fly) for my start Gcode and the research into the Extruder calculations quickly got confusing. The term "flow rate" (as it refers to mm^3 / sec) through the nozzle tends not to mean anything. It took a while for me to get comfortable with that. Each individual machine has an upper value of Flow Rate beyond which it can't keep up but even something as simple as that varies with temperature, material, hot end, and other factors. It's another moving target.

That's all well and good for you professionals. How come there isn't a "Whatever's Cheapest" category for us retired guys?