GregValiant

Get everything set up in Cura and ready to slice. Use the "File | Save Project" command and post the resulting 3mf file here. Someone will take a look. You could post that gcode file as well.

The "Creality" Belt Printer software may be a good choice for you. So long as the angle of the Y is the same it should slice OK and print OK. It can't hurt to give it a try. Your printer and the Crealty belt printer look much alike. Any differences should be available for you to change in the Manage Printers / Machine Settings dialog. Please understand that I don't have access to a belt printer and I have never used one...but I do read a bit. There have been issues with both the Creality version and the SainSmart version but there appears to be much fewer complaints about the Creality version and most of those seem to center around Build Plate Adhesion and if that is ever a software problem it would be exceedingly rare.

@EggFriedCheese that speed looks right for 20mm/sec. That's what the gcode is telling the printer the speed is, and that looks like 20mm/sec to me. I have altered your gcode file and attached my version here. These are the changes I made: Remove all the heating commands and the purge lines. Remove all extrusions Set the first 3 layers to 5X print speed. Moved the Z up to 10mm and added a G92 to fool the printer into thinking its at 0.2mm. The printer will Auto-Home, move up 10mm, and then air print at 100mm/sec (minus your Accel setting). This is what 100mm/sec looks like on that model. After you have let this run for a minute, abort it from the LCD and turn your printer off and then back on so it forgets about the G92 setting. GV at 100-Flexy.gcode

Strawberries please, and lots of syrup.

Hello @MariMakes and @EggFriedCheese I took the gcode apart with MS Excel and the speeds in the code are what they should be given the settings. Layer 0 goes down at 20mm/sec, Layer 1 goes down at 21mm/sec, and layer 2 goes down at 23mm/sec. Through 50,000 lines of code the maximum print speed is 50 and the average print speed is 26.19.So this seems to be a printer issue. There just aren't any lines in the gcode that would tell the printer to move faster than what the Cura settings seem to be. Something you can try is to go into Cura "Manage Printers" and "Machine Settings" and near the beginning of your StartUp Gcode add two lines: M220 S100 ;Reset feed rate to 100% M221 S100 ;Reset flow rate to 100% If you tuned a print while it was running, and immediately went to another print, then that "tuned" setting would carry-over to the second print. Having those lines in the StartUp G-Code insures that a print starts at 100% flow and 100% feed rather than at some other rate.

@amy1234 did you try that Pancake Painter software? It's simple and looks pretty good. You can bring images in to trace. I don't know how much more you would need for pancakes. I never did get the chocolate printer to work right. Maybe if I would have put the printer in the refrigerator?

Once you get down to the single assemblies you will be able to print them in whatever orientation you want. When I sliced that front wheel I see that there is Support structure within the interior of the wheel, but not everywhere. That is odd. Since I had turned on "Remove all Holes" (yes, you have to remember to turn it off) there must still be gaps in the model. That's a tough project and will take a long time to print. That single front wheel was over 9 hours.

Wow. Is that ever a mess. There are 258 separate meshes assembled to make up the 4 wheels. The lug nuts are full of flipped normals. In it's current form that "assembly" is not repairable (I tried) and consequently it isn't printable. If you want to print those you will need to jump through some hoops. Load the Mesh Tools plugin from the MarketPlace. You will have to restart Cura after loading it. Load your model and select it. Right click and the top command will be Mesh Tools. One of the tools is "Split Models into Parts". Do that. Piece by piece delete one of the rear wheel assemblies. Piece by piece delete one of the front wheel assemblies. Right click and choose "Select all models". Cross your fingers. Right click again and choose "Merge Models". If it works the model may jump off screen. Select "Select all Models" and manually set the XYZ location so it's back on the build plate. If that worked (it did on a single front wheel) then go to the Mesh Fixes settings and enable "Remove all Holes". Hopefully it will slice. This is without touching up the settings. It still needs a lot of work.

I've attached a project file. I think this looks pretty good. "Outer Wall Inset" = -0.8 and "Horizontal Expansion" = -0.14. The hole is created by a support blocker in the bottom that is exactly as thick as "Bottom Layer Thickness". It's configured as a Cutting Mesh with no top or bottom layers, no walls, and no infill. GV_Vase_Dominik_Cisar.3mf

I don't work for UltiMaker (actually, I don't work at all) so I don't know what they would include in an "alpha" version. My guess is that it would be kind of hit-or-miss as not all changes and additions might be ready to publish. All additions and changes to Cura have to pass some tests. The Thunder definition might have passed in Windows but failed for the Mac. I don't really know.

If you are using Cura 5.1.1 then the only option for the base is "Concentric". There was a lot of complaining about that and it was changed so that other patterns could be used. I can't remember if it was 5.2 or 5.2.1 but I use 5.2.1 and as you can see - "Lines" is once again available. Did you figure out how I got the hole in there? It's a test ya' know.

It looks like the "Thunder" definition was added on 12-13-2022. Cura 5.3 will be released shortly and your definition should be in there. In the short term you could try adding a different Geeetech printer that has the same number of nozzles. Change the bed size to match your machine and it should work.

You can see that the gcode ends without the "End of Gcode" line that Cura always adds. Something is going on there. Like most applications, Cura counts on the operating system to write files to any drive. Here is a gcode file sliced in Cura 5.2.1 (sliced for my Ender 3 Pro). You don't have to print it, just open it in Notepad and see how a proper file ends. I don't know about the bad write to the hard drive. It's just a text file so it isn't like anything complicated is going on. I'll think on it and maybe someone else here can chime in. ShortCube.gcode

I'd start by formatting the SD card again. If there are bad memory sectors on it there is no way for Windows to tell. When Cura asks Windows to save the file a chunk of it may be written to a bad sector. The printer doesn't know and so when the data runs out it stops in mid-stride. If you save the gcode to your hard drive, and also save it to the SD the files should be identical. You can open them in Windows notepad and compare them (open the file directly from the SD card). Scroll down to the end of each file. A good file will have a "settings" area at the end. A corrupt file will end abruptly or with a lot of computer gibberish. If you want to save those stock files then make sure you copy them over to your hard drive before you re-format the SD.

If I understand correctly - what you want is the other way around. If you set "top layers" to a number > 0 then the "Top Surface Skin Layers" setting is enabled. When that is > 0 then "Top Surface Skin Flow" is available. So your general settings would be to get the intermediate layers correct, and then have separate flow setting for the number of "top skins" you set. If your printer allows for it - have you calibrated the E-steps? When Cura tells the printer to push 100mm of filament then exactly 100mm's of filament should be fed through the extruder.

How do layers 2, 3, 4 look? If they are OK and if you are printing 100% infill anyway then maybe changing to 50 top/bottom layers would be better than 100% infill on that piece. It's possible a flow adjustment might be in order. What size nozzle and what is your line width?

There are settings in the Wall section that will fix much of that. "Wall Transition Length" and "Wall Transition Angle" are two of them. Another setting is the Line Width but you can only drop a .4 nozzle to about .35mm. Features that come to a "feather edge" are tough.

This is what I usually do. The left hole has one of 5axes cylindrical support blockers configured to "Modify Settings for Overlaps" and 5 walls. Screw connections do much better with more material for the head of the screw and the nut to put pressure on. They will still deform over time, but not near as readily.

It depends on what it is printing over. If it's sparse infill then adding another top layer should fix it. From what I can see of that image there looks to be a checkerboard pattern. That can be indicative of the infill still affecting the layers above.

Line Width. Once the walls of the model get too small the nozzle can't fit in there. You could try setting "Remove All Holes" or maybe "Make overhangs printable" but that would make the model mostly solid. You would need to check for side effects with those settings. You can print with a 0.4 nozzle at .35 line width. An option would be to go to a .3 or .2 nozzle. If you slice at a .2 line width you will see the walls come back, but a .4 nozzle won't print that skinny.

In Cura, load a calibration cube or benchy and set up a slice. Use the "File | Save Project" command to create a 3mf project file. Post that file here and I'll take a look. Those "kodak begin" lines in your StartUp gcode appear to mark the beginning and end of the startup section. That's a pretty sparse section. The startup itself does show that "G1 X100 Y100" line that moves to near the center at 50mm/sec. I don't see a reason for that in there. That G0 travel line is inserted by Cura after the startup and that G0 speed is undefined and so it is likely traveling at the homing speed which is pretty slow. Your startup can also be affected by extruder change code. That will show up in the project file.

STL's don't have any location information in the file. Some 3mf files do. The models have to know where they belong in space. If that information isn't in the file then merging doesn't work. Cura isn't an assembly modeler. You can fool it, but this is one of those things where there is no "Easy" button. If you bring your models into a CAD program, or MS 3D Builder, you can usually locate them in the orientation you want fairly easily. Then make a plate just smaller than your printer build plate and extending downward below Z=0 by 1mm. Attach a copy to each of your models when you save or export them. When you bring them into Cura set the location of each model to X0 Y0 Z-1. The plate will dictate the "bounding box" and so each model will be in the correct orientation to each other. It's a workaround, but isn't terribly difficult and you should get what you want regardless of the lack of location information in the files.

AHoeben has put together a list of the Cura keywords HERE. They are essentially the variable names used within Cura. Certain ones you can put into your StartUp and Ending Gcodes and when the gcode is created Cura will replace the keywords with the actual setting value. M104 S{material_print_temperature_layer_0} would be replaced by your "Initial Layer Print Temperature". M140 S{material_bed_temperature_layer_0} would be the bed temperature. In the ending gcode a line like G0 F7200 X0 Y{machine_depth} would bring the build plate forward (or nozzle back depending on the printer). That makes it easier to get a print off the plate. There are some speed words like {speed_travel} but they are in mm/sec and gcode is in mm/min so they end up being really slow. Cura would replace {initial_extruder_nr} with the extruder that was first up for the print. If it's the last line in your gcode then even if your startup had switched extruders for heating that would get straightened out before the print actually started. It's a picky situation though. You don't want to heat an unused extruder, but it's hard to configure the StartUp gcode for that. You may want to install another printer that you use for "extruder 2 only" prints. That way you could configure the StartUp gcode specific to that situation. I have a separate defined printer I use for TPU because the PLA purge lines are way too fast.

Ah, I see. You can try lowering the "Wall Transition Length" in 5.2.1. This is the default (0.35 I think it is tied to the Line Width). This is with the setting at 0.10

I liked 4.13.1. It's very stable and worked well for me. In the end though, if the gap is full of plastic it's full of plastic. You can only see it when it's printing. Functionally have you noticed a difference? I don't really see one.